Do you ever feel like you're stuck in a gay surrealist fantasy painting?

[Zylka]

If so, share

Hovering, everything hovers like a brazen bubble which should have been shot down by the heat. She approaches with a masque of splendor - f*cking peacock? Amateur. This one is filled with cardboard from the recieving area of the grocery store he worked at when he was 60. Only this time, the product arrives as a giant crystal chess piece

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Seen Bosch? The "Garden of earthly delights" triptych? That's my life- tiny demons poking people up the bum and all.

[Zylka]

HAHAHAHA Oh man

Seriously, studying for art history and often chance flipping by that painting - I would sit and stare at it for hours instead of study

The green, earthly paradise part? Why the f*ck would anyone deserve to have to experience looking at that?

[Clear Skies]

Do you ever feel like you're stuck in a gay surrealist fantasy painting?

Um...no. Although the five other people who live in my head make it pretty interesting in there on their own, thank-you-very-much.

[monolith94]

What do you mean by "gay"... as in containing homoerotic elements... or just painted by someone who's gay... or do you mean "gay" as in "stupid"?

[Zylka]

Great, thanks Bosch. You've ruined my mind forever (not to mention Christmas for the next 5, 495 years to come)

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Ah yes. Possibly the greatest weirdo in art.

[Zylka]

Oh, really? Then I'm inclined to believe that you have not yet experienced the absolute horror of Max Ernst:



uh

Really. I was doing well, had met a nice girl in class, had my dreams under control, a non-existent drug habit - then my prof pulls this sh*t out of nowhere.

[monolith94]

hahaha I remember Bosch and Ernst...
They never really disturbed me that much though... I've always approached their material rather objectively.

[Zylka]

There's nothing objective about them

They're horrible rendering of stolen dreams, exaggerating only the qualities that pain us with guilt. Come to think of it, I've never painted surrealist myself.

hehehehe... that's a potential mental weapon if I've ever had one

[molly bloom]

For nightmarish art you have to go to the Social Realist hell of official Soviet Bloc and Chinese Communist propaganda. Tractors painted so lovingly, you'd swear the artist was in a relationship with them.

A tall Stalin, without a withered arm, cuddling small children.

Or Nazi neo-Romanticist kitsch- Hitler as an armoured Tristan on horseback, or Himmler as a Burgundian knight.

Of all the modernist painters, Francis Bacon I find most unsettling- the suffocating, silent screams of the immobile trapped figures, popes or businessmen, held fast in the airless confines of their private antechamber of hell.

[Zylka]

I knew someone would bring Bacon up

He's terrifying, but in more of a face value "OH MY GOD THAT PAINTING IS YELLING AT HIDDEN GHOSTS" terrifying. I think he faltered in the truly disturbing in that he was so busy with being perma drunk and having ass-sex

I am intrigued of this tractor you talk of!

[monolith94]

zylka, I said I was objective, not the art.

That said, if he's stealing anyone's paintings, he's stealing YOURS not mine! If he was stealing mine, the paintings would be less filled with violence and concentrate on a single character and would have a broader p.o.v.

[Zylka]

Oh there's no issue of plagiarism here, and I can respect these works as they are. Problem is, exposing them to the general public is a lot like Cambodian prostitution; there's a lot of 12 year olds, and they're all working for some guy named Ngu

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Zylka
I knew someone would bring Bacon up

He's terrifying, but in more of a face value "OH MY GOD THAT PAINTING IS YELLING AT HIDDEN GHOSTS" terrifying. I think he faltered in the truly disturbing in that he was so busy with being perma drunk and having ass-sex

I am intrigued of this tractor you talk of!

How interesting you chose not to expand on the sex-life (or otherwise) of Ernst or Bosch, and yet felt the need to reference the openly gay Bacon's...

Bcon addresses a panoply of modern horrors- angst, alienation, isolation, the claustrophobia of metropolitan life- whereas Bosch deals in mediaeval mystical Catholic punishments in the afterlife. Although I admire Bosch's imaginative fertile creativity, the torments of a religiously inspired hell no longer frighten me. As Sartre would say, 'hell (now) is other people', or as Pascal would say,
'the eternal silence of these infinite spaces leaves me in terror'.

That to me is the horror of a Bacon painting- eternal silence and screaming without sound, and infinite space in a paradoxically enclosed environment.