Eerie Ambience

The Atmospheric Aesthetic 
While browsing and searching for inspiration I have found some images that I love, but the creators of which are unknown, I will include them as there method is relevant. I have been looking into methods of creating landscape, referring to the Surrealist techniques I mentioned before and ideas across various disciplines.

These images use a reductive method to outline the subject, particularly the last one, I like the idea that the environment is more important than the object.

Larousse Encyclopedia of Astronomy, circa 1959, Lucien Rudaux

I am in love with these photographs, the grainy quality, the colour. Even though they are documenting real life events in astrological/natural terms, they are alien to me - a glimpse at another world. 

John Henry Twacht

Gustav Le Grey (1820 - 1884) 

Invented the idea of combination printing, creating seascapes by using one negative for the water and one negative for the sky at a time where it was impossible to have at the same time the sky and the sea on a picture due to the too extreme luminosity range

Particularly interested in the SUBLIME

Creating a landscape

Kim Keever 

Kim Keever's sublime landscapes have the appearance of the historical paintings of Rosa, Turner and Joseph Wright. However Keever does not use paint and a canvas he creates his ethereal worlds with in an aquarium adding topiary and pigment and capturing the changes that occur in the environment on a large format camera. I haven't seen a sequence of shots as Keever selects the perfect scene, yet I imagine if each shot were put next to one another the movement seen would add to the eery worlds behind the glass. I love the idea of capturing a moment in the landscape, that moment that hold the power, the shot that accentuates and highlights the thunderous clouds or twisted trees. 

Gregory Euclide

Gregory Euclide's work interests me due to it's textural qualities. I enjoy the way he uses layers to create strange and evolving landscapes. The way in which he just concentrates on a small area in a space, leads me to conjure up ideas of hidden realms behind the structure, I almost want to peel of the layers myself to see what else can be unearthed. Euclide uses a mixture of mediums including wall paper and emulsion, and works outside of a rigid frame work, creating pockets of landscapes. 

Bruce Wilhelm

 I have included Bruce WIlhelm in my research as an example of layering a scene. There is a theatrical stage element to his work, and he tends to play with the fusion of various planes in an unconventional way. Although this work isn't reflective of my personal aesthetic values, it is a great example of the possibilities in creating a fictional landscape, and an idea of how fragmenting can add to the chaos of a scene. 

Jacek Yerka

 

Imaginary worlds and fictional landscapes are heavily used with in illustration work. I love the way Yerka uses a limited palette to create his series of paintings, and enjoy the childlike intrigue the work provokes.

Glenn Brown 

 Glenn Brown is one of my favourite painters, and on researching for my project  discovered these two landscapes. I did not immediately recognise them as Browns work mainly due to there monotone nature, however I think they are great examples of the way in which the texture and density of land, in particular rocks and cliffs can be used as a starting point in creating strange landscapes.

Modern Landscapes

So far I have documented the historical landscape art that inspires me, from Dante's world written as far back as the fourteenth century through to the works of Turner, Joseph Wright, Salvator Rosa and more over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These works set a precedent for future artists, those of which im going to explore next.


Charles E Burchfield (1893 - 1967)

Village in the Swamp, 1930

American visionary artist. A watercolor painter from Ohio, Burchfield is known for his visual commentaries on the effects of Industrialism on small town America as well as for his paintings of nature described as "the mystic, cryptic painter of transcendental landscapes, trees with telekinetic halos, and haunted houses emanating ectoplasmic auras." His influences as van Gogh, Caspar David Friedrich, Marsden Hartley, John Marin the Village Voice, "Mystic cryptic revelations" by Jerry Saltz, Dec 13, 2005

SURREALIST LANDSCAPES

Max Ernst (1891 - 1976)

DIe Lust Leben 1936

Die Faszinierende Zypresse 1940 

Nightmare

Max Ernst's are alien. they can be apocalyptic and some remind me of films such as Day of the Triphids, I love the unusual shapes created and Ernst's techniques of applying paint add to the sporadic and fantastical images. 

There are several Techniques I would like to experiment with in my project;

SURREALIST TECHNIQUES

• AEROGRAPHY - 3D Object used as a stencil with spray paint
• BULLETISM - Shooting ink at a blank surface and developing an image from the marks
• COULAGE - Involuntary sculpture. Molton material poured into cold water and cooled to take random forms
• ECLABOUSSURE - Watercolour or oil laid down and water or turps splattered on the surface, then blotted to  create new dimensions
• ENTOPIC GRAPHOMANIA - Dots made at sites of impurities in paper and lines made between dots.
• EXQUISTIE CORPSE
• ETRECISSEMENTS - Collage made reductively cutting out parts of images to encourage a new image
• GRATTAGE - Scraping away dry paint
• HEATAGE - Exposed & Unfixed photo negative heated from below causing the emulsion to distort in a random fashion
• SOUFFLAGE - Liquid paint is blown to inspire or reveal an image
• FRACTAL DECALOMANIA - As the sheets separate paint adheres to both the top and bottom forming noges between the papers with increasing distance between the papers. The paint ridges coalesce and a branching pattern appears, as more and more ridges coalesce, a dendritic fractal forms. 

Salvador Dali (1904 - 1989)

Swans reflecting elephants

Autumn Cannibalism

Remedios Varo (1908 - 1963)

Remedios Varo was a spanish-Mexican female surrealist painter. I am looking at her as she was famed for using the ECLABOUSSURE technique listed above. 

Valle Luna

James Gleeson (1915 - 2008)

James Gleeson was an Australian Surrealist, his themes included literary, mythological and religious subject matter and was interested in Jung's archetypes of the collective unconscious. During the 1950's and 60's he moved to a more symbolic perspective forming small psychedelic compositions made using the surrealist technique of decalcomania in the background, to suggest a landscape.

James Gleeson is one of my favourite painters, his dreamy ethereal, fragment subjects create their own worlds, as a viewer you can spend so much time just piecing together the scene, the palette he uses has a darkness to it but is lifted with pale blue hues and yellow highlights, they have appear to be quite spiritual in my eyes.

The Sublime Landscape

The Sublime Landscape at The Tate 2007

What are the scenes of nature that elevate the mind¿ and produce the sublime sensation? Not the gay landscape, the flowerly field, or the flourishing city; but the hoary mountain, and the solitary lake; the aged forest, and the torrent falling over the rock. (Hugh Blair, Lectures, 1783)

The following paintings shown below suggest that the landscape can be a source of awe, mystery or even terror. These responses were associated in Turner's lifetime with an aesthetic category known as the Sublime.

In his influential Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful(1757), Edmund Burke distinguished between the Beautiful - things that are smooth, unthreatening and pleasurable - and the Sublime, things that are huge, obscure or terrible and arouse feelings that invigorate and elevate the mind.

These ideas spread widely, informing popular literature as well as aesthetic debate. In an age of change and uncertainty, the Sublime offered a kind of shock-tactic that affirmed the significance of an individual's innate response to nature. In the visual arts, it led artists to create a dramatic new vision of the natural world. But it was Turner who explored the potential of Sublime landscape imagery most comprehensively.

JMW Turner, The Tenth Plague of Egypt  exhibited 1802

This painting illustrates a passage from the Bible describing one of the plagues inflicted on the Egyptians as divine punishment for enslaving the Jewish people: the killing of all the first-born sons of the Egyptians. It is uncomfortably crowded by threatening atmospheric effects, emphasising the power of forces beyond mankind’s control. 

JMW Turner, Buttermere Lake, with Part of Cromackwater, Cumberland, a Shower exhibited 1798

American Sublime 

The Apocolyptic Sublime

Thomas Cole, The course of Empire: Desolation 1836

Destruction is Cole's finest essay in the apocalyptic sublime. It is influenced by John Martin and JMW Turner, from whom Cole derived the swirling vortex of cloud. Cole's prophetic vision of calamity may have had contemporary resonances in December 1835, while Cole was working on canvas, a fire swept through lower Manhattan, causing massive destruction in the wall street area.

Frederic Edwin Church (1826 - 1900)

Iceberg Flotante  1859, 

Aurora Borealis 1865. 

Morning in the Tropics 1877

Church eagerly read the works of the English critic John Ruskin, who taught young artists that to observe nature closely was to 'follow the finger of God'. The scientific precision of Church's works can be compared with Pre-Raphaelite landscapes of the same period. Like many of his contemporaries, Church firmly believed in economic progress as part of the divinely-ordained destiny of the United States. Admiring the heroic efforts of pioneers in clearing the forests and creating new farmland, artists such as Church and Sanford Robinson Gifford nonetheless lamented the resulting destruction of the wilderness. The stumps of felled trees symbolised this cruel transformation. 

Creation of a World

A World in the eyes of an artist

So far I have looked into the area of landscape that comes from not only sight but feeling and emotion, the images captured by the artists and film makers I have so far collected allow us to see more than a replica of the scene in front of the easel or through the window - they have given the viewer much more, a sense of movement and touch. They have depicted the wind, fire, rain, the coldness on a cliff top or the fear of an exploding mountain. Through the romantic notions of such artists the viewer can understand the turbulent moods of nature and the power that has given centuries of thinkers unanswerable questions about faith and Science. 

The film Koyaanasqatsi gathers together information from the way we live our lives today, it has amalgamated our lives into a chaotic and relentless glimpse of an overall picture. I have never felt as hopeless and hopeful all at the same time. It is imagery like this and questions of humanity and existence that can allow the imagination to roam free, there are no rules, just our own individual experiences and ways of life, those things we have been taught or have had passed onto us.

I will be exploring the artist in terms of there imagination, through literature, music and visual arts.

As a starting point in exploring other worlds I have found Dante's divine Comedy an inspiring and mesmerising read, with an incredible aesthetic encyclopedia of responses from artists.

DANTE &THE DIVINE COMEDY

Illustration to the Divine Comedy (Inferno)by SANDRO BOTTICELLI

Dante Allighieri as a poem that was written between 1308 and 1321 and is seen as one of the greatest work of world literature to date. The poem represents allegorically the souls journey towards God through three stages, as Dante is guided on a journey through the afterlife encountering the realms of the dead, lasting from the night before Good Friday to the Wednesday after Easter in 1300.The journey is divided into three realms INFERNO, PURGATORIO and PARADISO

In the 1800's during the romantic period Dantes divine comedy became increasingly popular, Artists took to illustrating the story and in true romantic spirit immersed themselves in the emotion and theatrics of the work, creating an unusual and terrifying world of fantastical characters and landscapes.

I am interested in the INFERNO, as it is has captured the imagination of artists through the centuries and built up the visual aesthetic that we now have when considering heaven and hell - fiery pits, burning sands and a red devil, Dante's powerful descriptive poem has created a cocktail of visual ideas that are rooted in history. 

For a comprehensive archive of the worlds of Dante, including timelines, maps and chapter breakdowns click here - World Of Dante

GUSTAV DORE (1832 - 1883)

Gustav Dore painstakingly illustrated the entire works of the  Commedia from as early as 1855, financing the publication of the first book of the series himself. His depictions of Dantes Journey have come to be to many a true representation of the afterworlds and realms of death, and when reading Dante are now the visual representations we recognise the most. Dore has illustrated several literary publications including works by Homer, Goethe and Byron, but his work on the Divine Comedy achieved the greatest success 'As one critic wrote in 1861 upon publication of the illustrated Inferno: 

"we are inclined to believe that the conception and the interpretation come from the same source, that Dante and Gustave Doré are communicating by occult and solemn conversations the secret of this Hell plowed by their souls, traveled, explored by them in every sense."

INFERNO

SheWolf

Charon

Gates Of Hell

PURGATORIO

Celestial Helmsmen

Buonconte

Eagle

PARADISO

Glowing Souls

Just Souls

Celestial Rose
HELLISH NIGHTMARES

Rodins Gates of Hell 

La Porte de l'enfer 1880

Gaetano Zumbo Triunfo del Tiempo 1691

John Henry Fuseli The Nightmare

Francisco Goya Saturn 1821 - 1823

These examples show the vivid and dark imaginations of artists toying with ideas of hell and humanity. Based on Greek mythology or religious content the unknown is depicted as nightmarish and sinister, deep colours fill canvases and the detail overwhelms as you search through and question the information captured.

Peter Nicolai Arbo - Aasgaardreien

CONTEMPORARY REFERENCES TO INFERNO

Depictions of Hell have been part of creative arts for centuries from painting, to sculpture, photography through to film we all have an idea of what we imagine hell to be like. We can pick out details that have been handed down to us through stories and folklore, we could even explain how something would feel with in the imagined landscape - the sands would burn or it would be hot etc, regardless of our religious beliefs. 

I have chosen a particular part of the Inferno to highlight as my favourite. I love the visual aesthetic it conjures up in my mind.

The following images combine the idea of landscape with the human suffering that we understand is represented in hell.

CANTO XIII

The Foliage not green, but of dark colour

The Branches not wholesome, but knotted and twisted

There were no apples but poisonous thorns

The Undergrowth is not so rough or dense

Where the wild beasts, which hate all civilization

Live between Cecina and Corneto

t is there that the filthy harpies make their nests

They who hunted the Trojans from the strophades 

Announcing dismally their future loss

They have broad wings, with human necks and faces

Feet with claws, their great bellies covered with feathers

They make lamentations on strange trees

And the good master said; 'Before you enter,

know that you are in the second ring,'

That is how he began,'And you will be until'

You set your eyes on the horrible stretch of sand:

Therefore look carefully, for you will see

things which you would not believe, if i reported them.

I heard cries coming from every direction

and yet saw nobody who could be crying

I became so bewildered that I stopped

I think he thought that i thought that those voices

and many there were, came from among the tree stumps

form people who were hiding themselves from us

Therefore the master said, 'If you break off

a little twig from one of these plants,

the thoughts you are thinking will be changed utterly'

Then I stretched out my hand a little way

and picked a little branch from a great thorn

And the trunk of it called out: 'why are you tearing me,'? 

Film still - AntiChrist     Lars Von Trier

Canto XIII - The Violent Against themselves in The wood of Suicides

This circle contains those who destroyed their own lives and substance. Suicides are included in this section Punishment: The suicides are encased in thorny trees, their leaves and branches exposed for the Harpies to eat them. The Harpies 

damage the shades, causing them to bleed. Only when the sinners bleed can they speak. The Violent against their Substance are driven naked through the woods by a pack of savage dogs. If caught the dogs will ripe off their limbs, which eventually regrow (continuing their torture).

WICKED TREES

INFERNO MAPS