Lusus Naturae came to an end yesterday, but through the wonder of technology you can still experience it virtually. Click below to wander through the exhibition:
The show got some nice press, and I was happy to have my piece ‘Magiae Viridi’ featured in Kaltblut Magazine and Creme Guides.
Lusus Naturae, a fantastic group show curated by Vanessa Souli, opens this Wednesday!
The two pieces I contributed were created specifically for this show and I’m excited to share them with the world.
The exhibition will be held entirely online due to the current covid19 lockdown situation, but don’t let that stop you from checking it out. All work can be viewed online, and a live walk-through of the exhibition will take place via Instagram on opening night.
Opening: January 20 at 18:00 (digital – via Instagram Live, @bcma_berlin)
Exhibition dates: January 21 – February 07, 2021
BcmA Gallery
Manteuffelstraße 42
10997 Berlin
The Latin term lusus naturae translates roughly as the ‘Freak of Nature’ or ‘Wonder of Nature’. A rare term used by scholars to describe incomprehensible objects and deformed beings in curiosity chambers and nature, the title of the exhibition alludes to the theme of the works presented: deformation, mutation and monstrosity lie in the epicenter of the concept.
Monstrosity and mutation have been topics which have interested humanity since the beginning of time – from the antique to medieval Ages through Renaissance to nowadays. In pre-Christian folklore and mythology, the topic of transformation and deformation has been very central. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we read dozens of short stories about fairies and gods, heroes and satyrs being transformed to animals and plants, inviting us to empathise, laugh and learn with the heroes. In Frankenstein, one is confronted with the question of ‘who is really the monster?.’ Although one might think of something very ugly and appalling at first, one should not forget the interest that lies behind unknown and unfathomable situations.
Therefore, this exhibition aims to highlight these ‘monsters’, give them a voice to speak out and act as wonders of nature accessible to the human eye through the magic lens of art. Exploring the theme of Frankenstein-ism through the eyes of a variety of established contemporary artists offers a unique opportunity for contemplation on the topic and its various expressions. Some humorous, some beautiful, some gloomy, some completely absurd, the scenes and characters shown on the paintings, sculptures and drawings of the artists presented are to be experienced with a range of emotions: fear, surprise, compassion, desire and disgust.
Nowadays with the advent of social media and beauty filters, people often neglect the fascination that non-conventional creatures have brought to generations before us. This exhibition aims to highlight the beauty of hybrid creatures and challenge their ‘ugliness’ by building a dialogue between old and new tradition.
Artists:
Katharina Arndt, Jim Avignon, Fritz Bornstück, Stefano Bosis, Dimitra Bouritsa, Maxim Brandt, Beth Braun, Joanna Buchowska, Ulrike Buhl, Troels Carlsen, Mimmo Catania, Claudia Chaseling, Jeroen Cremers, Amrita Dhillon, GodsDogs, Grigori Dor, Christina Foitou, Elena Alonso Fernandez, Zohar Fraiman, Abie Franklin, Andrew Gilbert, Giuseppe Gonella, Lennart Grau, Philip Grözinger, Eric Haacht, Tanja Hehmann, René Holm, Stella Kapezanou, Sarah Kretchmer, Miriam Lenk, Katsuhiko Matsubara, Christopher Colm Morrin, Amalia Mourad, Mascha Naumova, Anna Nezhnaya, Justine Otto, Eglė Otto, Allan Paul, Christian Perdix, Paul Pretzer, Cornelia Renz, Noah Ryu, Susanne Schirdewahn, Moritz Schleime, Kerstin Serz, Semra Sevin, Alexander Skorobogatov, Rebecca Stevenson, Mairen Hernandez, Miriam Vlaming
This piece was completed yesterday evening – on the summer solstice at sundown.
The name of the piece, “The Art of Drawing Spirits Into Crystals,” comes from a grimoire attributed to Johannes Trithemius (1462 - 1516), which describes how to build and use a crystal ball apparatus to communicate with spirits, kind of like an interdimensional Zoom call.
In this piece I continue to explore narratives of finding magic close to home, hiding in plain sight in the places and things we least expect, and the elements featured in the piece were found in and around my home: Textile-covered electrical cables and a length of green garden hose arc over and encircle a large quartz crystal upon which a moth sits, head down. A yellow snail slips out the lower right corner, and a blue-orange gradient cuts upward diagonally to the right.
All of these elements arise from a gaping hole; there is no clear ground upon which they rest, and everything is in a state of transition and uncertainty.
Magic harnesses and directs chaos; it is from chaos that change can occur.
With the world suddenly pivoting to focus on what is close to home, it feels appropriate to search out the magic hiding in our living rooms, gardens, closets, and other spaces in the domestic environment. I’ve begun noticing everyday things like vacuum cleaner tubing, electrical cords, pipes and garden hoses. The new exotic creatures are the moths that fly in the window, and the snails slowly eating the plants in the garden. These are the elements I now consider as I continue to explore the magic quietly embedded in our lives, and what it looks like.
These objects and creatures are fairly invisible due to their ubiquity, and is exactly what makes them distinctly interesting to me. Electrical cords give power. Pipes and hoses cleanse and hydrate. Moths flutter in a vast array of colours, shapes and sizes, and the shell of a snail is an exquisite work of art, a natural expression of an equiangular spiral.
Below are three works in progress; two still in the underpainting stage, and one fleshed out in colour. As before, the pieces represent visual magic spells and are comprised of a few key elements: Something mundane (the electrical cord or garden hose), something exotic (the snail or moth), something in transition (the magenta-red gradient), and a rift or break in reality from which all of these elements arise (the gaping black hole):
The Art of Drawing Spirits into Crystals I
Treasure Spirits I
Treasure Spirits II
I am super happy to announce my upcoming solo exhibition, "Ordinary Magic", taking place January 23 - February 29 at Gudberg Nerger in Hamburg, Germany!
Opening night is Jan. 23 at 7pm. Hope to see you there – Gudberg Nerger • Poolstraße 8, 20355 Hamburg, Germany.
Increasingly, the western world has been going through an occult revival, ushered in by the popularity of J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter books (and subsequent films), and sustained by a general dissatisfaction and disillusionment with organised religion and the world in general. Where magic and the mystical were once viewed with suspicion, they are now embraced and celebrated openly.
Unfortunately, the art world remains a space where magic still receives a cold shoulder. As Maurice Tuchman, then the curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, stated in the New York Times, “‘Spiritual’ is still a very dirty word in the art world”.
It’s odd that there hasn’t been a greater acceptance of the occult in artistic spheres, given that the act of creation is itself a magical act – an act that has one foot in the nether realms of the subconscious, and the other in the tangible, material world that we all know and love. And I completely agree with writer Alan Moore’s statement: “I believe that art is magic and that art, whether that be music, writing, sculpture, or any other form, is literally the science of manipulating symbols, words or images, to achieve changes in consciousness... Indeed to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change peoples consciousness, and this is why I believe that an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world to a shaman.”
Thankfully, the tide seems to be turning – I found a hero in Hilma af Klint and marvelled at her 2013 exhibition at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof Museum of Contemporary Art, which featured her “Paintings for the Temple” series. The museum didn’t hold back and gave full explanation regarding the spiritual origins of her work.
I saw this as a turning point, and look forward to further acceptance of magical and spiritual ideas and their expression in contemporary fine art.
My new series of paintings address magic twofold: They are both inspired by magic and are also magical objects. The works individually describe what a magic spell looks like, and as an added layer are magically charmed with unique properties that are specific to them. This goes above and beyond simple metaphors – the paintings both describe and embody magic.
This dual nature strengthens the art; It helps the viewer not only see magic laid bare, it also puts them in its path, to receive an added benefit from having been in the presence of the work, however subtle or nuanced or spectacular that might be.
I feel the art world is ready for a renaissance of magic. The things we place in our environments affect our psychology even if only in a subconscious, subtle way, and we should choose these objects with care. The time is ripe to take advantage of artwork that can both enrich a space visually as well as contribute to it in other, less obvious ways.
I’ve been working on another piece in the Magic series, this one inspired by The Arbetal de Magia Veteran, a Latin grimoire of ceremonial magic published in 1575 in Switzerland.
The piece features a blue sofa armrest to represent the mundane world, a zebra shark to represent the extraordinary, a pink-blue gradient to represent transformation, and a black hole out of which the elements arise, to represent an opening in reality.
So far so good. I need to punch up the highlights, shadows and details in the sofa and put the ‘zebra’ spots on the zebra shark, but overall I’m making good progress on this one and should be able to pronounce it finished in the next day or two.
Here are some work in progress images:
Spent this afternoon working on Lemegeton, my the second piece in the new Magic series. It’s not finished, but it’s almost there. Below you can see some images of it in its current state. The yellow snake still needs work, and there are some un-tidy edges and things I’d like to clean up, but on the whole I think it’s largely finished.
The piece is comprised of a few key elements: Something mundane, something extraordinary, something in transition, and something extra-dimensional. The upholstered sofa-end is mundane, the yellow snake is extraordinary, the pink-to-green gradient is in transition (going from one state to another), and the giant gaping hole is indicative of a dimensional rift.
These are going to be the four elements I play with as I go along, mixing and combining them as though they were the ingredients in a magical spell.
I’ve begun work on a new series of paintings based on themes of magic. Given that the act of creation is, in itself, a magical act, it feels right to explore these ideas through paint.
Each piece will draw inspiration from a famous (or infamous?) magical text – beginning with The Book of Abramelin.
The Abramelin is a very involved, 18 month ritual, after which the mage reportedly gains the ability to speak with their guardian angel. It’s so involved, in fact, that you basically need to withdraw from society and eschew all forms of pleasure or fun, that I think it would generally be impossible to pull off in the modern world. You would need a trust fund, Oh! And you need to have a home with a dirt floor and balcony. It’s very specific regarding the kind of place you need to live if you do the ritual. Anyway, you’d basically need to be independently wealthy and particularly antisocial to be able to pull this thing off. Aleister Crowley is said to have done it twice.
Here’s a work-in-progress shot. A snake curling around a pink headboard, floating in airy space with a little bit of alternate dimension opening up beneath. The mundane and the extraordinary meet and entangle:
Still missing various key elements and details, but it’s a start. And hopefully it will take less time to complete than the ritual it’s inspired by.
This piece didn’t take long at all to complete, it’s almost like it painted itself.
Working with something called Medium W (not sure what that stands for) proved to be hugely beneficial, in that I didn’t have a single migraine as I worked on the piece, which is a kind of miracle to me. It took a bit to get used to the way it interacts with the quick-dry medium I like to use. And I was unable to form a glaze with Medium W by mixing pure pigment into it, which was kind of a let-down. But I live and learn, and in the end I think the resulting piece is quite successful.
Here are a few work-in-progress images:
And here is the finished piece:
Last fall my sensitivity to paint thinner got so bad I had to close up my studio and quit painting when the weather turned cold because I could no longer open the windows and adequately ventilate my studio. This was fairly devastating and I wondered if I would need to switch to acrylic paint, which is akin to staring into the abyss for me.
And I think I’ve finally found a solution. People tell me that there are alternative ways to thin oil paints without the use of solvents. So I can continue to use oil paints, and thin them with a water based medium (which sounds like it bends space, time and physics but hey, as long as it works, right?)
I got my hands on something called “Medium W”, a galkyd medium which the sales clerk assured me would free me from working with solvents, and I am super excited to dive into my next painting.
In lew of painting I’ve been keeping a sketchbook, so there’s tons of material to pull from that’s been collecting within the pages. This is the drawing I’m selected to translate into oil paint:
Beribboned Sheep graze within a cave beside pink and gold pools in which black swans swim. A small orange figure in a balloon suit floats by a cloudy opening in the cave wall.
Where did this particular idea come from? I was scrolling through Facebook and saw that a friend had posted a picture of lambs, commenting that it was apparently lamb season, and that spring must finally be here. That post and comment somehow sparked this image in my mind, which I suppose alludes to the transition of seasons from Winter to Spring. Or something like that, I try not to question things too much and just run with it.
The canvas is already stretched and the primer is drying, can’t wait to get started.
I'm putting the finishing touches on Dr. Faustus (King Moon & the Rube) today, and pronouncing it finished.
I’m really happy with the way this piece turned out – the floral elements sprinkled throughout, the baby goats peaking through the farm door, the flatness of some areas versus the 3-dimensional quality of others – it all works nicely together. And besides all of that, it’s a happy piece, one that makes me smile when I look at it. So yeah, I’m really happy with the way this one turned out.
I'm at that point that seems to happen to me in every painting. I clip along as quick as can be, thinking that I'm just a few sessions away from completion, and then Bam! I hit this speed bump where everything seems to grind to a snail's pace. I got some work done today, but I feel further from finishing the piece now than I did when I began. It's the drying time that's tripping me up. I made a couple big moves, and now need them to set before I can layer or mask on top of them. It's a frustrating part of the process.
Here's a look at where I finished up at the end of today's session. There's still so much I need to do, but can't risk meddling with it anymore today or risk smudging the wet areas:
I spent a solid day in the studio yesterday fleshing out Doctor Faustus.
At this point the surface needs to dry before I can continue. I need to be able to mask parts off and it's currently impossible, the tape won't stick to the surface. Other areas are so fresh it would smear the paint and make a mess. I tried to add some translucent stripes over the right side of King Moon (currently just one messy blue stripe) and you can see how the paint got under the non-sticking tape, uuug. I don't hate it, it's okay if there's a messy stripe or two, but I'd like at least some of them to be nice and crisp like the solar rays in the upper left.
Also need to complete the Rube's chair/cube/thing that he's sitting on. Soo much to dooo.
Having completed "Venus Bathing", I've decided to return to oil painting through a series of illustrations of classical literature.
To begin this venture, I pulled 'Doctor Faustus' by Christopher Marlowe off my bookshelf (never got around to reading it) and let the book fall open. The first sentences that I found read thus: "Ay marry, there spake a doctor indeed! And 'faith, I'll drink a health to thy wooden leg for that word." This was enough. From these sentences I will illustrate Doctor Faustus. I think of it as 'illustration out of context'.
I had a bit of free time on a bus ride from Katowitze to Berlin last week to sketch a composition out in my notebook. From there I was able to create more detailed source material by photographing a willing subject and collaging in some fairytale imagery. It's a rough visual roadmap of where I intend the piece to go.
I got some stretcher bars, built a frame and stretched it. Gessoed it in the past days, and laid down a background glaze of bright pink. This is going to be a fun one.
I finally got back in the studio yesterday and made some progress.
It’s been so cold in recent weeks I’ve wanted to do nothing but cocoon myself in layers of blankets, but yesterday it was at least in the positive digits, so I blasted the heat and made the studio inhabitable.
I darkened the landscape surrounding the figures to help define them and give them some contrast. Also used some warm pink and orange to give the flesh some life.
There’s still a blue cast to the bodies so I may work even more warmth into them, but I’m going to hold off on making a final decision on that until I’ve had more time to look at the piece and decide if that’s really what I want to do. I don’t want to lose the impression of the environment merging with the figures, and pumping them up with too much fleshy colour might jeopardise that.
I'm also going to work at lightening the bit on the left were the greenery meets the sky, I’d like it to fade back and blend a bit more. It's currently a bit too loud and too florid.
Here's a detail of my favourite figure in the bunch:
I went over to see the Georg Baselitz show at Contemporary Fine Arts this afternoon. Highly recommended. It's up until March 3, 2018. Here's a look at some of the work on display:
As it's a new year I thought I would kick things off properly by cleaning up the studio and switching the wall I work on from the left side of the room to the right. I Spent the day cleaning, moving furniture around and putting up fresh paper to protect the wall. A new tarp is soon to follow, I just mopped and am waiting for the floor to dry before putting it down.
I've been working on this acrylic painting, "Venus Bathing," after a painting of the same name by Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée from 1776. So far so good.
I'm using this great new blue, or "petrol", from Swiss paint manufacturer Lascaux. It's pricey stuff, but so rich! That's a top-shelf blue, that. Very happy how the Lascaux blue towel plays off the cheaper store brand yellow towel. Only the best for this goddess. The white towel weirdly looks like a ghost. Perhaps I should fix that.
Saw an exciting show of Elvira Bach paintings at 68 Projects – big and bold, with great colour. Here's a glimpse of what was on view:
