Motivation to paint
Introduction
Explaining the unexplainable
Existence
I think therefore I am
Impressionalism
Visualise the feeling
Self-portraits
Who am I?
Art that I like
Australia
Beauty in the wasteland
Europe
The underbelly
Iconography
Picture writing
Chinese Art
Traditional and modern
Great European Art
Goya - Saturn Devouring His Son
I love the dark works of Francisco Goya. They are so emotionally confronting, and the fact that the most horrific of them were painted for Goya's personal consumption in his dining room makes them even more psychologically intriguing. In Saturn Devouring His Son, Goya painted a Roman myth that foretold that Saturn would be overthrown by one of his sons, just as he had overthrown his father. To prevent the prophecy, Saturn ate each of his children as soon as they were born. His wife eventually hid his sixth son, Jupiter, on the island of Crete, and deceived Saturn with a stone wrapped in swaddling. Just as the prophecy had predicted, Jupiter overthrew his father.
The painting shows the son with the body of a man, and Saturn seems almost terrified as he devours it. While the painting was only of a myth, it is quite easy to imagine that Goya saw aspects of the myth being played out in different individuals around him as they struggled for supremacy, or maintain that supremacy.
I think painting gruesome pictures may have been Goya's way of dealing with the emotional turmoil in his world. Painting has a way of deconstructing emotion, and reconstructing it into a cognitive form. In this cognitive realm, the horrors of the world seem less horrific. So much so, Goya was able to dine in the presence of a man consuming his child. The paintings may have also helped Goya make sense of a world in which people were eating their own kind - metaphorically speaking.
Picasso – The Minotaur
As Picasso freely admitted, much of his work was nothing more than silly little pictures designed to make him money. His works with the Minotaur; however, I do think has a great deal of substance behind them. For me, The Minotaur represents a type of sexual congress between a man and woman. The Minotaur seems to symbolise a lost balance between the raw desire of nature and the human world. The woman's body lays crumpled before the beast, with her vagina centimetres from its jaws.
In myth, the Minotaur was imprisoned in the labyrinth. Picasso liberates it to depict it carnal orgies. In doing so, Picasso symbolises the escape of the males' primal desires from their human constructed prison.
Young Virgin Autosodomized by Her Own Chastity - Dali
At times, I think Dali was more concerned with displaying his skills with a paintbrush than with creating a work of art. As a consequence, I think a child with some training in photoshop could produce some imagery worthy of comparison with him. Dali's series on melting clocks; however, definitely do seem to have some kind of resonance that goes far beyond paintbrush skills. I'm also a big fan of Young Virgin Autosodomised by her Own Chasity. In the painting, a woman is leaning over a rail with horned shaped objects being pointed at her. One of the horns seems ready to rape her. Her buttocks are made from the points of the other two horns, so in effect, one horn will rape two others.
For me, the image has a sense that chastity is fragile, and it can be broken very easily. In a way, the woman is punishing herself by holding on to it. The blue sky may represent the future orgasms that she can look forward to once her chastity is broken. Alternatively, the sky represent the dreams of romance that compel her to remain pure. Once her chastity is broken, then she loses the very horns that make her who she is. Furthermore, once her chastity is broken, one horn has defeated the horns trying to maintain her chastity.
Toulouse-Lautrec- Woman with Her Toilet
I love Toulouse-Lautrec's subject matter of prostitutes, lesbians, and brothels. Errol Flyyn articulated the appeal perfectly when he said:
"I enter a whorehouse with the same interest as I do the British museum or the Metropolitan - in the same spirit of curiosity. Here are the works of man, here is an art of man, here is the eternal pursuit of gold and pleasure. I couldn't be more sincere. This doesn't mean that if I go to La Scala in Milan to hear Carmen I want to get up on the stage and participate. I do not. Neither do I always participate in a fine representative national whorehouse - but I must see it as a spectacle, an offering, a symptom of a nation."
The thing that I like most about Lautrec's work is that he painted sex in a very unsexual way. When he painted lesbians kissing, they seem to be kissing for show rather than as an expression of passion. He painted a seated dancer wearing pink tights looking exhausted, and very unlike the person that would appear on stage. One of my favourite paintings is woman with her toilet. From a purely visual point of view, it is a beautiful painting, and quite sexual. However, if one considers she is taking a piss, one has to look at the painting in a completely different light. It seems as if the woman is beyond caring. She has been demeaned to such an extent that nothing really matters to her anyone. In that light, it is not a sexual painting at all.
Judging Art