Phantasmaphile

Histories

                           

                  

 

It struck me recently that three of my all-time favorite books have the word "history" in the title:

A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman is a work that I read over ten years ago, but which still has a profound effect upon me to this day.  It is a non-fiction exploration of each of the five senses, stuffed with fascinating facts, anecdotes, and some of the most lyrical writing I have ever encountered.  This is the sort of book that makes one feel impossibly blessed to be alive.  I think it's time for a reread.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt is a fictional story about a small group of Classics students at an uppercrust liberal arts college who find themselves dangerously influenced by their scholarship.  Thrilling, satirical, and thoroughly absorbing, it's the sort of book that begs to be read under the covers with a flashlight.  I don't want to give too much away, so I'll leave it there for now.  But trust me, you won't be able to put it down.

The Secret History of the World by Mark Booth is an extremely controversial book, which I am currently reading and adoring.  Essentially, Booth calls into question everything we've been taught about the development of matter and man by looking at esoteric and mystical teachings through a more literal lens.  I realize it's a bit premature to call it a favorite of mine as I'm not done with it yet.  But it has all the trappings of the books I love:  mythology, magic, symbolic analysis, clandestine societies, covert rituals, and an irreverence toward the status quo.   

Steven Alexander Dixey

Steven Alexander Dixey  "Artemis of Ephesus"  2007

If there's one thing I can't resist more than a magnificent painting, it's a magnificent painting in an opulent frame.  Steven Alexander Dixey's works are windows into worlds populated with goddesses, grandeur, and gore.  I can't recall a more visceral, kickass depiction of my favorite deity, Artemis, than the one shown above. 

Craig Conley

Craig Conley is a man of so many wonders, it is difficult to know how to begin speaking about him and his work.  First and foremost, he is a scholar of language, symbology, and magic, and has written many books on these topics.  For simplicity's sake, I am going to list some of them here, as the titles alone are enough to make one's brain buzz happily:

One-Letter Words: A Dictionary

Magic Words: A Dictionary

Magic Archetypes: The Art Behind the Science of Conjuring

The Carte Blanche Atlas

A Field Guide to Identifying Unicorns by Sound

The Skeleton Key of Solomon

....and that's just the beginning.  I would also add that the design of these books is nothing short of delightful, stuffed as they are with old engravings and marvelous esoteric iconography.

In addition to his blog, books, and articles, Mr. Conley has also put a great deal of care and imagination into the architecture of his various web sites.  I encourage you to visit them all, click around, and play the multitude of games and divination exercises he has devised.

OneLetterWords.com

MoonFishOcean.com

MysteryArts.com

Tarot of Portmeirion

There, that should occupy you for many miracula-filled moments.  Enjoy! 

Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott, redux

Mert and Marcus, W Magazine, August 2007

Here's further proof that Mert and Marcus are the most visionary photography team working today.  It reminds me quite a bit of the new Goldfrapp video (or maybe vice versa).  I love the fresh take on the babe in the woods archetype, as well as the amped up Saudek palette.

Beach House

Hooray!  Beach House's new album, Devotion, is coming out on Tuesday the 26th.  It sounds even more lush and opiate than their eponymous first effort.  This is music to listen to with eyes closed and candles sputtering.

Lorenzo Petrantoni

Lorenzo Petrantoni  "700"

I am head over heels in love with Lorenzo Petrantoni's clip art extravaganzas.  These really do merit a closer look, so be sure to click on the above image so you can view all of its mind boggling detail.

Nils Karsten Interview

Nils Karsten's piece in the Pricked: Extreme Embroidery show, up through 4/27/08

When I first started Phantasmaphile in October of 2005, I wanted it to be a space where art, magic, and the imagination could intermingle and be celebrated with some amount of (I hope) intelligence and contemporary relevance.  Though I had a stable of artists in my head whose work I couldn't wait to share, there was one artist in particular who I thought would be perfect to set the tone for this site.  Nils Karsten was selected for my first artist post ever, due to his uncanny depictions of children's psyches, replete with all of their demons and marvels.  While his work is beautifully fantastical, it also has a brutality that feels both honest and sophisticated.  It is with great delight, then, that I unveil the interview below.

Phantasmaphile:  How did you get started as an artist?

Nils Karsten:  I always drew, but to be honest I never knew what it meant to be an artist until fairly recently.  Nothing seemed as interesting as being an artist.  And I didn't like the idea to pursue a second best choice without trying to be an artist first.  I have to admit that I briefly went to law school and after dropping out I did and apprenticeship as a cabinet maker.  Finishing all that I decided to become an artist.  I still didn't know what that really meant and how I would become one.  I moved to New York and went to SVA, which was a good start, but it didn't help much to feel like an artist either.

Ph:  When did you finally start feeling like an artist?

NK:  Before I thought of myself as an artist, I referred to myself as a painter.  More as a job description than in any other meaningful way.  I think it was after my Skowhegan artist residency in 2002 that I started to feel like an artist. The previous two years were very difficult for me, I questioned myself very much and the idea of being an artist.  But all of a sudden I felt like I should just go for it, and not bail out (not really knowing what to bail out of anyway ... ).  Having a real dialogue with fellow artists in Skowhegan really made the difference!  Doubts are so much part of being an artist - and I wasn't the only one who had great doubts. 

Ph:  What are some of your influences?

NK:  People and good stories.  I love story tellers and pictures, but not together. I am always in for a good story, and I don't really care if it's a true story or not as long as it is a good one.  Pictures always inspired me, especially old photographs and images in magazines.  They had to be a little dated, so I could play time machine in my head.

    I like good art.  The first artist I really liked was Otto Dix, I got a catalogue of his work when I was 15 years old.  I was drawn to these beautiful images of crippled soldiers and hookers during the post World War I area in Germany.  I like many other artists for different reasons.  Sigmar Polke, how he uses his studio almost as a laboratory always inventing and reinventing the use of images and narratives.  Philip Guston is one of the greatest painters for me.  I love Hans Bellmer.  I like the German Surrealists of the 1930's in general quite a bit.  Henry Darger, Marlene Dumas, Martin Kippenberger and the most contemporary of them all - Goya. 

Ph:  Your pieces almost exclusively depict children: both their innocence and wonder as well as a more grotesque, shadowy side.  What is it about childhood that you find so compelling?

NK:  We were all children at some point and relied on our imagination and the perceptions of adults to survive, which is quite a conflict.  Childhood is traumatic; it's implied!  I am interested in trauma, memory and Romanticism, but not just in childhood.  Everything begins in childhood, maybe that's why my work focused so much on this first period of life as well, but I am moving on - as we do in life.  I am lot more interested in detached Romanticism, psychology in general, and yes, still people including some children, but you'll have to wait a little bit to find out what I really mean by that.  I am not completely sure yet either.

Ph:  What was your own childhood like?

NK:  My childhood was fine.  Nothing terrible at all; that doesn't mean that it wasn't traumatic, but as I said before, that is what childhood is about.  Of course I felt awkward at times, but don't we all do?  Imagination and play are the weapons of a kid to deal with stuff.  I had fun with it.  Nevertheless, I like being an adult much better now. 

Ph:  I remember the first time I saw your work, and was struck by how brave it seemed for you to take these finely rendered graphite drawings and then seem to scribble madly over them.  How did you come up with this technique?  Is it scary at all to add this top layer of doodling?

NK:  Drawing is playing a story for me.  It's almost cinematic on a piece of paper, frames over frames.  First you create a character or a thing, and then you might destroy it again.  Maybe it becomes something else, or you just don't like it anymore, or you like it too much so you have to scribble over it to see how you feel afterwards. It's just like the Pirate who looses a leg and grows a beard during the course of making a drawing.  The final drawing is the residue of the battle.

Ph:  Your most recent solo show at the Marvelli Gallery seemed to be a bit of a departure for you:  what made you want to switch from graphite to paint for this show?

NK:  I wanted to have a good reason to make large paintings on paper.  I painted on canvas before - fairly large, but I was never quite happy with the surface quality.  I tried to paint on wood as well, but I always liked paper the best.  The big breakthrough came when I used a small brush with india ink on large sheets of paper.  I immediately loved it - it felt somewhere between using a paintbrush and using a graphite pencil.  And I solved the scale problem as well.  It's funny, but that took me seven years to figure out.   Drawing is very intimate.   It's the pencil, the paper and basically my wrist, that's it.  I wanted to be more physical.  I loved the fact that I had to climb on a ladder 40 times a day to work on those large pieces.  It's a more physical experience for the viewer as well.  I feel that my small drawings operate on a more psychological level, and the large, painterly pieces are a lot more emotional, but maybe that's just me.

Ph:  What is your process like?  Is there a specific set of circumstances that you set up beforehand (a certain time, particular music, etc), or is it more free-flowing than that?

NK:  It's free-flowing to a point, but it involves preparation and planning as well.  I have a lot of ideas - constantly.  I don't think good ideas make necessarily good art.  You have to sort them out and/or let them transform during the process of making a piece.  I have to admit that I think a lot more now than I use to do, but I would still describe my process as non-linear.  I like to invent techniques, I love to steal images and ideas and make them mine. My studio is very important to me, it's a sanctuary and a torture chamber at the same time - and that's what I need, a certain amount of tension, conflict, but also some feel-good moments.  During the day I am listening to NPR.  In the evening it's music.  I love to finish a working day with a couple of beers examining the result of that particular day.  This can be a pleasant experience or quite depressing.

Ph:  You piece in the Pricked: Extreme Embroidery show at MAD is breathtaking.  There is a silvery, almost lunar sheen to the piece that seems to echo that of pencil lines.  How did this piece come about?

NK:  I was invited by Pearl Lam to make a functional piece in Shanghai that combines traditional Chinese crafts with my own work.  I could have done anything from ceramics to jade carving, but I was very much interested in embroidery.  I love drawing, and I wanted to see how far I could push it with embroidery.  I really thought it might not work out and will look a little cheesy in the end, but when I saw the first small sample I was completely convinced.  I picked silk that looked like the off-white of the paper that I am using, and the silk thread had to resemble the graphite of the pencils I am using.  It worked out very well.  The fact that somebody else was making the piece was quite intriguing to me.  All the little mistakes were embroidered as well including some pixels that showed up on the large computer print of the drawing that weren't really there.  I thought that was beautiful.

Ph:  What is your favorite sight, taste, sound, touch, smell?

NK:  I could give you a million answers here.  Well, I love JFK airport after being away from New York for a very long time!

Ph:  What are your next plans?

NK:  I am working on a new body of work!  I am very excited about the beginnings, but can't tell you much more at this point.  A couple of shows later this year and I might go to China again this summer for a little follow up piece.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Judith Schaechter  "St. Violentine"

Happy Valentine's Day, Phantasmaphiles!  Here is one of my favorite pieces by stained glass thaumaturge Judith Schaechter.  I hope your day is filled with love of all flavors.

And for those that care, it is also my birthday.  Feel free to buy me any work of art I've featured on this site.  ;-)

Marnie Weber

Marnie Weber  "The Swan"

Marnie Weber's collages combine photographs of pallid women with magnificent, disproportionately sized animals.  The result is a new kind of portraiture that feels like some kind of fantastical hyper-reality.  (A bit of trivia:  Weber also did the cover art for Sonic Youth's A Thousand Leaves.)

Andrea Aversa

Andrea Aversa  "Untited (Natura Morta con Pesce e Petroliera)" 

You must click on this image to see it in fuller size. Andrea Aversa uses minatures to create surreal dreamscapes which feel expansive and otherworldly.  By playing with scale and cinematic lighting, he seems to throw off the viewer's center of gravity in the most delightfully eerie manner.  You can see some of his photographs in person in an upcoming group show at Sloan Fine Art, beginning on February 20th.

Obscura Art Installation

Now this sounds tasty:  Mike Zohn and Evan Michelson (owners of the exquisite Obscura Antiques) have collaborated with Justin Theroux, Douglas Little, and Scott Campbell to create an installation entitled "Sometimes Comes Mother, Sometimes Comes Wolf."  It is described thusly:

"A journey through a world of seductive surrealism, antiquated pop culture, awe and wonder."

If this sounds intriguing to you, too, be sure to check it out ASAP, as it is only up through February 9th.  It's on Broome St between Essex and Ludlow, open from 12-8pm, and admission is free.

R.I.P. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

                  

His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi passed away on Tuesday.  He was the founder of Transcendental Meditation, and guru to such luminaries as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and David Lynch.  This news resonates on a particularly synchronistic level for me personally, as I very recently finished reading a small gem of a book by Lynch entitled Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity.  In the book, Lynch discusses the impact his practice of Transcendental Meditation has had on his life and his creative process, saying that it has allowed him to gain access to more vivid, potent ideas:

“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.”

In a further twist, my pal Joanna and I had been planning on going to our local Transcendental Meditation center today, to learn more about the practice ourselves.  May Maharishi Mahesh Yogi rest in peace, and with the knowledge that his legacy is spreading day by day. 

Eva Eun-sil Huan

            

             Eva Eun-sil Huan  "Chucuter" 

Eva Eun-sil Huan's "On the Soul" series takes my breath away.  It's rare to be able to say this, but I truly haven't seen anything quite like it before.  Marvelous, isn't it?

Via

Melora Kuhn

Melora Kuhn  "Consumation"  2005

The girls who populate Melora Kuhn's world are right out of a Balthus painting, with their liminal sexuality and older-than-their-years gaze.  Kuhn's pieces are nods to salon portraiture, but with a decidedly Jungian bent, full as they are of dream symbols and mythic tropes. 

Via