#inspired by another leonora carrington story

[everydaylouie]

Igname the Boar

#blender #3d #inspired by another leonora carrington story #“as they rode along the edge”

[blackswaneuroparedux]

The Surrealist magical mystery of Leonora Carrington

I didn't have time to be anyone's muse... I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.

- Leonora Carrington (1917-2011)

Leonora Carrington is often categorised as a Surrealist, but the label was bestowed by association rather than any adherence to the movement: the painter, sculptor, and writer launched her career in 1930s Paris, as Max Ernst’s much-younger lover and a friend of other Surrealist bigwigs like André Breton and Marcel Duchamp. But in spite of the otherworldliness of her paintings, which have a penchant for chimeras, underworlds, pagan rituals, and the occult, Carrington rejected the epithet - along with any critical efforts to get the artist to explain her works. “I am as mysterious to myself as I am to others,” she once claimed.

For the one of art’s most under appreciated artists, British-Mexican painter and novelist, Leonora Carrington, managed to completely redefine female symbolism through her own interpretation of surrealism. Painting as she put it, “is a need, not a choice.” 

Stallion by Leonara Cole

Carrington was a restless and prolific artist throughout her career - she worked in oil painting, bronze and cast iron sculpture, but also mixed-media pieces that combined wood, glass, and various iron objects. Besides her important role in the history of surrealism, Carrington was also known as a romantic partner of another prominent surrealist, Max Ernst. The two of them shared their dream worlds and symbolic universes through their magnificent artworks. Carrington has also rejected the surrealist ideal of woman as the main source inspiration and she turned to novel realms such as the animal world, the occult, and Celtic mythology.

Although she was introduced into the Surrealist movement she out grew all those artists and to pursue her own vision. Indeed it’s been told - by no less than herself - that shortly after she became friends with members of the Surrealist movement, Joan Miró once handed her a few coins and told her to go buy him a pack of cigarettes. “I gave it back and said if he wanted cigarettes, he could bloody well get them himself,” she told the Guardian in 2007. “I wasn’t daunted by any of them.” Carrington had more metaphysical matters to pursue.

She sought to capture fleeting scenes of the subconscious where real memories and imagined visions mingle. In Carrington’s rich universe, ethereal beings enact rituals with unknown purposes; these creatures have characteristics of women and animals, and seem to be somewhere between humans and beasts. There’s a soft glow and sensuality to her paintings, and some critics have said that this emphasizes Carrington’s femininity, not as a crutch but as a gift. Carrington outlived many of her Surrealist colleagues, and when she died in 2011, she left behind an immense body of work - novels, prints, plays, costumes, and hundreds of sculptures and paintings. For a while, their importance was overshadowed by her relationship with artist Max Ernst. Art institutions have since rectified the oversight.

Carrington was born in Clayton Green in Lancashire, England, in 1917 to a wealthy mill owner, though later in life she liked to say that she had never been born - she was made, the product of a union between mother and machine. Given that her parents were quite wealthy, young Leonora received an excellent education from specially assigned tutors and nuns. However, her nature was rebellious and it was impossible for her parents to control her - she ended up being expelled from multiple boarding schools. Her parents expected to raise a privileged girl to come out into society as a debutante. Leonora had other ideas. 

As a child, Carrington was prone to fantasy. She was thrown out of two convent schools; according to the nuns, she claimed to be the reincarnation of a saint. Ill at ease in her aristocratic household, she turned to painting and writing, steeped in the stories of Lewis Carroll and folktales learned from her Irish mother and nanny. Her mother was a vaguely sympathetic figure; of her father she wrote, “Of the two, I was far more afraid of my father than I was of Hitler.” Exasperated, her parents sent her to a finishing school in Florence, where she attended Mrs. Penrose's Academy of Art, and then to another one in Paris, but neither experience could tame her. Defeated, they enrolled her at art school in London under the French modernist Amédée Ozenfant. She lasted three years there.

In the Times interview, Carrington said two writers had proven formative to her. One was Alexandra David-Néel, the first European woman to visit Lhasa in Tibet, still a forbidden site for foreigners in the 1920s. In disguise, David-Néel crossed the Tibetan border, and after immersing herself in Buddhist religion, she became a llama. Carrington described her tale as “electrifying.”

The second source of inspiration was given to her by her mother in 1936: a copy of Herbert Read’s new book, Surrealism. It included contributions from some of the progenitors of the field - André Breton, George Hugne, Paul Éluard. On its cover was a reproduction of a work by Ernst. Around 1927, she became fully enamoured when she saw a surrealist painting at the Left Bank Gallery. Later on, she happened to meet many surrealist painters, including the famous Paul Éluard.

Leonora’s father opposed his daughter's career as a painter, while her mother encouraged her. Carrington, who was a natural-born rebel, decided to trust only her own instincts, which led her to deep and passionate dedication to surrealism.

Harry Read’s book certainly left an impression upon her. Young Leonora was impressed by surrealist ideas and she shared their curiosity about the unconscious mind and dream imagery. However, she didn’t want to copy the already existing aesthetics; instead, she infused her own ideas and interests, revolving around a unique blend of cultural influences, Celtic literature, renaissance painting, American folk art and even medieval alchemy and popular Jungian psychology.

Thanks to these bizarre multiple influences, Carrington's art is full of half-human half-animal hybrid figures or imaginary beasts. Through this brave and challenging imagery, the painter explored important and universal themes, such as transformation and sexual identity. Carrington never stereotyped women as objects of male sexual desire and she focused on the depiction of contact and interaction between women of various ages.

In 1937, Carrington met the German painter Max Ernst, another key figure of the Surrealist movement. She described an instant “affinity” for his work, particular for his painting Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale (1924), which is now owned by MoMA. The pair later met at the dinner of mutual friend. Their ensuing affair—Ernst was married, Carrington was a 19-year-old student - is a well-known story. Her family nicknamed her Prim; to Ernst, she was the Bride of the Wind. He promptly separated from his wife and the pair ran off to Paris.

There they rejoined the tight-knit group of writers, photographers, and painters who called themselves Surrealists. Their doctrine, with its celebration of disorientating juxtapositions, was fertile ground for Carrington’s imagination. There was beauty, they believed, in comical and curious couplings of human, myth, and machine.

They lived and worked together in Paris and supported each other's artistic ideas and vision. They also created a couple of collaborative pieces they used to embellish their home.

She and Ernst eventually retreated to a farmhouse in the Rhône Valley. They painted its interior with creatures in mid-transfiguration: women turning into horses, many-limbed lizards. A mermaid sculpture was erected in the terrace. In 1938, she finished her first Surrealist breakthrough, Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse). In it, she is perched on the edge of a chair, face stern and hand extending toward the maw of a female hyena (a reoccurring character in her work). A tailless rocking horses hangs still behind her, a shadow of the stallion galloping freely beyond the open window. Horses and hyenas appear frequently in her writings and paintings (“I’m a hyena,” she once said. “I get into the garbage cans. I have an insatiable curiosity.”) There’s tension in meeting: a clash of the domestic and wild.

There was tension, too, between Carrington and her male peers. The women on their periphery were viewed as femmes enfants, muses and objects of lust. In their art, a women’s anatomy was dissected, distorted, rearranged - raw material that was both carnal and inanimate. Ernst, for his part, had carved into the façade of their home an image of himself beside a faceless woman. In Carrington’s art, women were granted interiority. They expressed desire, and their figures, even when freed from earthly confines, were made whole.

Unfortunately, Max Ernst was arrested by the Nazis while he was living in France. Ernst and Carrington would not reunite. Due to her anxiety and fears related to Ernst’s situation with the Nazis, she suffered a mental breakdown and ended up being institutionalised. Her experience in the mental hospital catalysed her career as a writer and many of her written and visual works were produced after she was released from the hospital, such as her novel Down Below from 1972 and her paintings Portrait of Dr. Morales from 1940 and Map of Down Below from 1943.

Down Below

She wrote movingly recounting the strange rituals that developed following their separation: for weeks she drank herself sick with orange-blossom water. She ate and napped sparingly. As German troops grew closer to her village, she feared that her enduring spirit “betrayed an unconscious desire to get rid for the second time of my father: Max, whom I had to eliminate if I wanted to live.”

When it comes to Max Ernst and his career, he was discharged from the Nazi prison thanks to the help of Paul Éluard and other friends. But soon after the Nazis invaded France, he was arrested again by the Gestapo, who considered his art to be "degenerate". Ernst couldn’t stand being imprisoned again and he managed to escape to America with the help of Peggy Guggenheim.

Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst

Meanwhile, Carrington’s mental health was getting worse and has reached the final breakdown at the British Embassy in Madrid. She was given a strong therapy by her doctors - she was treated with both cardiazol, a powerful anxiolytic drug, and luminal, a barbiturate.

After being hospitalised for a while, Carrington decided to run away and seek refuge in the Mexican Embassy. In the same period, Ernst married Peggy Guggenheim in New York in 1941. Even though their marriage was a short affair and it ended a couple of years later, Ernst and Carrington didn’t resume their relationship. One of the reasons for this was Carrington’s problematic mental health.

She eventually traveled to Spain, but was admitted to a psychiatric ward in Santander amid a psychiatric break. (“I was made a prisoner in a sanatorium full of nuns,” she wrote.) She returned to that period frequently in short stories and painting, such as Green Tea (1942), which depicts the sanitarium grounds as a dizzying labyrinth.

Having entered a marriage of convenience with the poet Renato Leduc, she arrived in Mexico City in 1942. It was a frosty welcome; Frida Kahlo reportedly called Carrington and her circle of émigrés “those European bitches.”

Carrington later remarried the Hungarian photographer Emeric “Chiki” Weisz, with whom she raised two children. Accompanied by the Varo and the photographer Kati, she embarked on research into the occult.

They studied alchemy, the Popol Vuh (an epic of Mayan mythology), and kabbalah. They conjured potions from recipes learned from local curandera, female healers who treat sicknesses of body and soul. They read Celtic lore, Carl Jung, and Robert Graves. She labored over inedible recipes, like one for an omelette stuffed with human hair. They smoked the marijuana she grew on her roof and painted.

Her work had grown lush with its own lore and androgynous beings. A menagerie of animals abounded as symbols of her own “inner bestiary.”

Carrington’s Mexico City studio wasn’t the utopia of her dreams, but it was a workshop unlike any other on earth. The effort was not without a cost: “I am an old lady who has lived through a lot and I have changed,” she wrote to a friend in 1945. She was only 28. Carrington didn’t attend her first major solo exhibition in New York in 1947, explaining to her dealer Pierre Matisse that, while the outside world hadn’t much been altered by the war abroad, she felt different, even alien.

Yet, despite her many troubles and chaotic state of mind, Leonora became well-known painter practically overnight. She has gained even more international recognition when her painting entitled the Juggler, from 1954, set a new record as the most expensive work ever sold by a surrealist painter. Carrington lived and worked in Mexico after spending early 1960s prevalently in New York City and rarely came back to her home in Lancashire, London.

When she moved to Mexico in 1963, she was asked to create a mural, which she eventually named the Magical World of the Mayas. This large-scale panoramic mural was influenced by Mexican folk stories and it is now located in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City.

The Magical World of the Mayas,1964 

Starting from the early 90s, Carrington began dividing her residence between Mexico City, New York and Chicago. Around the same time, she also began producing various bronze sculptures , representing animals and humans. She also continued making paintings, prints, and drawings and she used to give interviews about her life and career, since the press was still curious about her activities. Leonora Carrington died in May 2011 in Mexico City due to pneumonia. She was 94 years; she has lived a long and accomplished life.

Carrington’s role in the internationalisation of surrealism was truly important, in terms of her artistic practices that introduced new elements to this movement. Leonora has written a series of texts about her own surrealist theory in the years following World War II and even though she is frequently overshadowed by her association with Ernst, Carrington's work has received even more public attention than Ernst’s in the 21st century.

Her approach is deemed visionary and strongly personal, while her symbolism is considered entirely new and authentic. The relationship between Carrington's writing and her paintings is another topic that has been popular among many art critics and scholars. The same goes for an important role in feminism in the new analysis of Carrington's art. The scholars claim that Carrington's highly personal visual expression which combines folklore and magic led the way aspiring female artists who wanted to explore new ways of addressing and portraying female identity.

During her long and successful career, Carrington was a truly eclectic artist. She wasn’t dedicated only to painting and sculpture; she published many novels, short stories, and dramas. She was simultaneously involved in theatre, movies, and tapestry design.

Thanks to the enviable quality of her work, her pieces now belong to numerous private and public collections, including the prestigious National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. It is interesting to note that Carrington, unlike many of her fellow surrealists, wasn’t interested in the psychological theory of Sigmund Freud. She stayed focused on magical realism, symbolism and alchemy and used autobiographical detail rather than theories on the power of our subconscious.

Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse)

She was also interested presenting female sexuality in a different way - her work in the 1940s highlighted the women’s role in the artistic process. For instance, her famous work from 1938, entitled Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse), offers a unique interpretation of female sexuality - Leonora has moved away from the common characterisation of female sexuality subverted to the dominant male role. The same artwork, Self-Portrait, also offers insight into Carrington’s curiosity when it comes to alchemy and transformation of matter and living entities. The hyena depicted in this work combines male and female traits into a whole, which was a novel idea in the era this work was created.

Carrington often used to paint horses and write stories about them, which is rooted in her childhood fascination with horses. For example, in her first published short story, entitled the House of Fear, Carrington portrayed horse in the human role of a psychic guide. Generally speaking, Carrington often used codes and her own secret language in order to describe certain terms and to enable the interpretation in her mysterious artworks.

It is known that Candlestick was her code for family and family issues, while the word Lord signified her father.

El Juglar

El Juglar (The Juggler) from 1954 is another Carrington’s famous work. This dreamy landscape is filled with horses, imaginary creatures and occultist motifs, and every element had a personal value for her. When it comes to collaborations, the most famous one is with fellow female surrealist Remedios Varo.

The debut exhibition of young Leonora happened in 1947, when she was invited to showcase her early pieces at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York City. She was asked to show her work in an international exhibit of surrealism, where she turned out to be the only female British artist.

This experience has launched her career and she became a true celebrity. Later on, when she moved to Mexico, she published several books. Her breakthrough in the UK happened with an exhibition in Chichester's Pallant House Gallery, West Sussex, from 17 June to 12 September 2010. This exhibition was a part of a number of international exhibitions titled Surreal Friends which celebrated the part women took in the Surrealist movement.

Beside Carrington’s work, there were also art pieces made by her friends, the Spanish painter Remedios Varo and the Hungarian photographer Kati Horna. In 2013, the biggest retrospective of her work so far was presented at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, the title was The Celtic Surrealist and Sean Kissane through Carrington's Irish background presented many social, cultural and political elements that can be found in her work.

In 2005, Carrington's piece The Juggler was auctioned with a starting price at US$713,000 at Christie’s. It set a new record as an art piece with the highest price set for a living surrealist painter. Carrington also did portraits of many actors, such as Enrique Álvarez Félix, son of actress María Félix.

In 2015, Eleonora Carrington was honoured by Google doodle for her 98th birthday. The subject of the doodle was her surrealistic painting, How Doth the Little Crocodile. This painting was inspired by a poem from the renowned writer Lewis Carroll and his book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Also, this piece was turned into Cocodrilo located on Paseo de la Reforma.

When Carrington died in 2011 she left behind a huge legacy. Through her work she didn’t just prove herself as a true surrealistic artist, but also as a remarkable individual. Her life was full of turbulent events - from the romance with Max Ernst to the escape from the Nazis, mental illness, and expatriate life in Mexico. Almost all of her dreamy and highly detailed art has strong personal symbolism. The remarkable creatures set in some other worlds were made based on Carrington’s experiences and psychotic episodes. Nevertheless, she never liked to explain this mystique. Despite the lack of explanation, the visual appeal was more than enough for her to get widely appreciated.

#leonora carrington #carrington #quote #art #aesthetics #surrealism #symbolism #modern art #british #mexico #max ernst #history #art history #culture #paris #second world war #femme #beauty

[letterful]

professional vibe diagnosis: bee @brownpaperhag​​ 💛

KEY TERMS: matriarchs, prophetesses, sorceresses, wise women, afrofuturism, polish vintage, textile design, embroidery, handiwork, architecture, material objects, physicality, the sense of touch, the joys of listmaking, taxonomy, morphology, cataloguing, speculative fiction, short stories.

media recommendations under the cut!

— when it comes to speculative short stories, Small Beer Press is where it’s at, and Kelly Link, its founder, is one of my favourite authors, ever. i’d recommend starting with Pretty Monsters! or this particular tale (about Eastern European diaspora, by the by). — Sofia Samatar’s Tender is another splendid collection, and this is probably my favourite story of hers. — also, if you don’t feel like committing to a single author, there’s always some great anthologies; i’d especially recommend The New Voices of Fantasy (edited by Peter Beagle, the author of The Last Unicorn!), anything edited by the VanderMeers, and Fantastic Women: 18 Tales of the Surreal and the Sublime. — (re: afrofuturism) while it’s still on my tbr list, one of my closest friends (whose taste is impeccable, and who is responsible for recommending me some of my now-favourite books) swears by Nnedi Okorafor's Binti novels, and i trust her with my life. also, Rosewater by Tade Thompson! i still need to read the other books in the series, ah. — (re: elderly female protagonists) Angela Carter’s Wise Children, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugrešić, The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington, Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (!), Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner, anything by Maggie Atwood, honestly. — Anna Swir! there are very few writers who have managed to capture the joys and woes of womanhood (in its various stages) as well as she did. i wanted to link her poems in their original polish, but? they’re not available online? there’s plenty of quality english translations, though! (x) (x) (x) (x) also, this article <3 (In Świrszczyńska’s poetry, the woman gives birth not only to children but also to the world. She appears in many different roles which are very often expressed in the first person: mother, daughter, loving, desiring, tender and grieving, crying after the deceased, taking care of the wounded, wild but very practical...) — this poem by Wisława Szymborska! (here in polish) — for some reason, your blog really reminds me of the latter part of Twig’s home with you music video... it inspired the moodboard, actually! — White is for Witching, Helen Oyeyemi (but also her short stories!) (also, this article on her <3), — The Broken Earth Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin (it won three Hugos!), — anything written by Olga Tokarczuk! i already mentioned Drive Your Plow..., but her entire bibliography is simply bewitching. — Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (imaginary cityscapes! poetic architecture!), — The Infinity of Lists by Umberto Eco (a personal fave, although it’s rather difficult to acquire), — Lists of Note (to be perfectly honest, it’s more of a coffee table book than anything of substance, but it’s entertaining nonetheless) — List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to BuzzFeed, — A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order, — The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History, — The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, — The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, — Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, — The Beauty of Everyday Things, — Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects, — The Secret Lives of Color, — The Poetics of Space (the fact that Mark Danielewski—of House of Leaves fame—wrote a foreword for this edition... yeah), — Architecture and Violence (re: your pinned post!) — some of my absolute favourite books about architecture and design were originally written in polish (and never translated into english, alas), and i can’t help but include at least some of them (plus, they’re a much more enjoyable way of keeping up with the language than duolingo and its hematologia): Miejski grunt. 250 lat polskiej gry z nowoczesnością, Wyroby. Pomysłowość wokół nas, Wanna z kolumnadą, Duchologia polska. Rzeczy i ludzie w latach transformacji, Ukryty modernizm. Warszawa według Christiana Kereza, Miasto Archipelag. Polska mniejszych miast, Źle urodzone. Reportaże o architekturze PRL-u. — speaking of polishness! i think you’d really enjoy sung poetry. here are some of my faves (my taste in music is that of a typical babcia): (x) (x) (x) (x) (x) (x) (x) (x)

#mam nadzieję że ci się podoba 💛 #t2

[k00257455]

For this project I took inspiration from childhood irish folk tales and stories that I heard in school and at home. I also looked at other artists that worked within this theme and how they chose to portray characters in the stories.

For example Bronagh Lee, an illustrator and artist based in Dublin. Her work includes posters,zines, editorial designs and prints. Below is an example of one of her works, Oenchenoe.

Another artist I looked at was Leonora Carrington, a surrealist painter and novelist.

The last artist I found was Jim Fitzpatrick, know for his elaborately detailed work inspired by Irish Celtic artistic tradition.

[weirdletter]

The Big Book of Classic Fantasy, edited by Ann Vandermeer and Jeff VanderMeer, Vintage Books, 2019. Cover art by (Jean Ignace Isidore Gerard) Grandville, info: penguinrandomhouse.com.

Unearth the enchanting origins of fantasy fiction with a collection of tales as vast as the tallest tower and as mysterious as the dark depths of the forest. Fantasy stories have always been with us. They illuminate the odd and the uncanny, the wondrous and the fantastic: all the things we know are lurking just out of sight—on the other side of the looking-glass, beyond the music of the impossibly haunting violin, through the twisted trees of the ancient woods. Other worlds, talking animals, fairies, goblins, demons, tricksters, and mystics: these are the elements that populate a rich literary tradition that spans the globe. A work composed both of careful scholarship and fantastic fun, The Big Book of Classic Fantasy is essential reading for anyone who’s never forgotten the stories that first inspired feelings of astonishment and wonder.

Contents: Introduction by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer “The Queen’s Son” by Bettina von Arnim “Hans-My-Hedgehog” by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm “The Story of the Hard Nut,” by E.T.A. Hoffmann “Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving “The Luck of the Bean-Rows” by Charles Nodier “Transformation” by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley “The Nest of Nightingales” by Théophile Gautier “The Fairytale About a Dead Body, Belonging to No One Knows Whom” by Vladimir Odoevsky “The Story of the Goblins who Stole a Sexton” by Charles Dickens “The Nose” by Nikolai Gogol “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” by Edgar Allan Poe “The Story of Jeon Unchi” by Anonymous “Feathertop: A Moralized Legend” by Nathaniel Hawthorne “Master Zacharius” by  Jules Verne “The Frost King: Or, the Power of Love” by Louisa May Alcott “The Tartarus of Maids” by Herman Melville “The Magic Mirror” by George MacDonald “The Diamond Lens” by  Fitz-James O’Brien “Goblin Market” Christina Rossetti “The Will-o’-the-Wisps Are in Town” by Hans Christian Andersen The Legend of the Pale Maiden” by Aleksis Kivi “Looking-Glass House” by Lewis Carroll “Furnica, or the Queen of the Ants” by Carmen Sylva “The Story of Iván the Fool” by Leo Tolstoy “The Goophered Grapevine” by Charles W. Chestnutt “The Bee-Man of Orn” by Frank R. Stockton “The Remarkable Rocket” by Oscar Wilde “The Ensouled Violin” by H. P. Blavatskaya “The Death of Odjigh” by Marcel Schwob “The Terrestrial Fire” by Marcel Schwob “The Kingdom of Cards” by Rabindranath Tagore “The Other Side: A Breton Legend” by Count Eric Stanlislaus Stenbock “The Fulness of Life” by Edith Wharton “Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady,” by Vernon Lee “The Little Room,” by Madeline Yale Wynne “The Plattner Story” by H. G. Wells “The Princess Baladina—Her Adventure” by  Willa Cather “The Reluctant Dragon” by Kenneth Grahame “Iktomi Tales” by Zitkala-Ša “Marionettes” by Louis Fréchette “Dance of the Comets: An Astral Pantomime in Two Acts” by Paul Scheerbart “The White People” by Arthur Machen “Blamol” by Gustav Meyrink “Goblins: A Logging Camp Story” by Louis Fréchette “Sowbread” by Grazia Deledda “The Angry Street” by  G.K. Chesterton “The Aunt and Amabel” by E. Nesbit “Sacrifice” by Aleksey Remizov “The Princess Steel” by W. E.B. Du Bois “The Hump” by Fernán Caballero “The Celestial Omnibus” by E.M. Forster “The Legend of the Ice Babies” by E. Pauline Johnson “The Last Redoubt” by William Hope Hodgson “Jack Pumpkinhead and the Sawhorse” by L. Frank Baum “The Plant Men” by Edgar Rice Burroughs “Strange News from Another Star” by Hermann Hesse “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka “The Hoard of the Gibbelins” by Lord Dunsany “Through the Dragon Glass” by A. Merritt “David Blaze and the Blue Door” by E.F. Benson “The Big Bestiary of Modern Literature” by Franz Blei “The Alligator War” by Horacio Quiroga “Friend Island” by Francis Stevens “Magic Comes to a Committee��� by Stella Benson “Gramaphone of the Ages” by Yefim Zozulya “Joiwind” by David Lindsay “Sound in the Mountain” by Maurice Renard “Sennin” by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa “Koshtra Pivrarcha” by E. R. Eddison “At the Border” by Der Nister “The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyon” by W.B. Laughead “Talkative Domovoi” by Aleksandr Grin “The Ratcatcher” by Aleksandr Grin “The Shadow Kingdom” by Robert E. Howard “The Man Traveling with the Brocade” by Edogawa Ranpo “A Visit to the Museum” by Vladimir Nabokov “The Water Sprite’s Tale” by Karel Čapek “The Capital of Cat Country” by Lao She “Coyote Stories” by Mourning Dove “Uncle Monday” by Zora Neale Hurston “Rose-Cold, Moon Skater” by María Teresa León “A Night of the High Season” by Bruno Schulz “The Influence of the Sun” by Fernand Dumont “The Town of Cats” by Hagiwara Sakutarō “The Debutante” by Leonora Carrington “The Jewels in the Forest” by Fritz Leiber “Evening Primrose” by John Collier “The Coming of the White Worm” by Clark Ashton Smith “The Man Who Could Walk Through Walls” by Marcel Aymé “Leaf by Niggle” by J.R.R. Tolkien Acknowledgments Permissions About the Translators About the Editors

#book #anthology #classic fantasy #dark fantasy #weird fiction #weird fantasy #fantastic literature #ann vandermeer #jeff vandermeer

[disturbingbookclub]

' "Another hour gone. But I'm not afraid. There's only one thing I regret: that I've lived for so many years without knowing where human happiness is to be found" '

📖  Four Russian Short Stories by Gazdanov and others - https://bit.ly/2JmMz8c - Free delivery worldwide (right-click & open)

In these stories, four writers - all exiles from revolutionary Russia - explore four deaths in a world in which old certainties have dissolved forever.

Penguin 🐧 Modern Box Set: https://bit.ly/2tPN4SX - Free delivery worldwide (right-click & open)

Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York’s underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Penguin 🐧 Modern Box Set: https://bit.ly/2tPN4SX - Free delivery worldwide (right-click & open)

📚  Here is the full list of Penguin Modern titles:

1. 🐧  Letter from Birmingham Jail – Martin Luther King Jr 2. 🐧  Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward that Deathchamber – Allen Ginsberg 3. 🐧  The Breakthrough – Daphne du Maurier 4. 🐧  The Custard Heart – Dorothy Parker 5. 🐧  Three Japanese Short Stories – Akutagawa and Others 6. 🐧  The Veiled Woman – Anaïs Nin 7. 🐧  Notes on Nationalism – George Orwell 8. 🐧  Food – Gertrude Stein 9. 🐧  The Three Electroknights – Stainslaw Lem 10. 🐧  The Great Hunger – Patrick Kavanagh 11. 🐧  The Legend of the Sleepers – Daniel Kiš 12. 🐧  The Black Ball – Ralph Ellison 13. 🐧  Till September Petronella – Jean Rhys 14. 🐧  Investigations of a Dog – Franz Kafka 15. 🐧  Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady – Clarice Lispector 16. 🐧  An Advertisement for Toothpaste – Ryszard Lapuscinski 17. 🐧  Create Dangerously – Albert Camus 18. 🐧  The Vigilante – John Steinbeck 19. 🐧  I Have More Souls Than One – Fernando Pessoa 20. 🐧  The Missing Girl – Shirley Jackson 21. 🐧  Four Russian Short Stories – Gazdanov and others 22. 🐧  The Distance of the Moon – Italo Calvino 23. 🐧  The Master’s Tools will Never Dismantle the Master’s House – Audre Lorde 24. 🐧  The Skeleton’s Holiday – Leonora Carrington 25. 🐧  The Finger – William S Burroughs 26. 🐧  The End – Samuel Beckett 27. 🐧  New York in 1979 – Kathy Acker 28. 🐧  Africa’s Tarnished Name – Chinua Achebe 29. 🐧  Notes on Camp – Susan Sontag 30. 🐧  The Red Tenda of Bologna – John Berger 31. 🐧  The Gigolo – Françoise Sagan 32. 🐧  Glittering City – Cyprian Ekwensi 33. 🐧  Piers of the Homeless Night – Jack Kerouac 34. 🐧  Why do You Wear a Cheap Watch? – Hans Fallada 35. 🐧  The Duke in his Domain – Truman Capote 36. 🐧  Leaving the Yellow House – Saul Bellow 37. 🐧  The Cracked Looking-Glass – Katherine Anne Porter 38. 🐧  Dark Days – James Baldwin 39. 🐧  Letter to my Mother – George Simenon 40. 🐧  Death the Barber – William Carlos Williams 41. 🐧  The Problem that Has No Name – Friedan 42. 🐧  The Dialogue of Two Snails – Federico García Lorca 43. 🐧  Of Dogs and Walls – Yuko Tsushima 44. 🐧  Madame du Deffand and the Idiots – Javier Marías 45. 🐧  The Haunted Boy – Carson McCullers 46. 🐧  The Garden of Forking Paths – Jorge Luis Borges 47. 🐧  Fame – Andy Warhol 48. 🐧  The Survivor – Primo Levi 49. 🐧  Lance – Vladimir Nabokov 50. 🐧  Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer – Wendell Berry

Penguin 🐧 Modern Box Set: https://bit.ly/2tPN4SX - Free delivery worldwide (right-click & open)

Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York’s underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Penguin 🐧 Modern Box Set: https://bit.ly/2tPN4SX - Free delivery worldwide (right-click & open)

🐧 🐧 🐧  SEE ALSO:

📚 Little Black Classics Box Set: http://bit.ly/2EPOnoQ - Free delivery worldwide (right-click & open)

From India to Greece, Denmark to Iran, the United States to Britain, this assortment of books will transport readers back in time to the furthest corners of the globe. With a choice of fiction, poetry, essays and maxims, by the likes of Chekhov, Balzac, Ovid, Austen, Sappho and Dante, it won’t be difficult to find a book to suit your mood. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of the Penguin Classics list – from drama to poetry, from fiction to history, with books taken from around the world and across numerous centuries.

📚 Little Black Classics Box Set: http://bit.ly/2EPOnoQ - Free delivery worldwide (right-click & open)

[kamccormickhnd1b]

Illusion-Research

While I have the time today, I’m making good use of it and doing a little research for my new brief today, giving myself a head start!

Surrealism: when did it begin? What is it?

Surrealism is the artistic use of painting, sculpture, literature, photography and film. Surrealists were inspired by Sigmund Freud’s theories of dreams and the unconscious and often believed insanity was the breaking of the chains of logic, they used and demonstrated this idea of theirs by creating imagery that was impossible in reality, placing unlikely forms onto unimaginable landscapes. And while it faded away as an organized movement, Surrealism never disappeared as a creative artistic principle.

Surrealism began in 1924 with with Dadaist writer André Breton’s Surrealist manifesto, although the movement formed as early as 1917, inspired by the paintings of artist Giorgio de Chirico, whose work and paintings often captured street locations with a hallucinatory quality.

While de Chirico himself abandoned the art style he had been using, after 1917, his influence reached the Surrealists through German Dadaist Max Ernst. 

Many artists took to joining the movement, some of these artists included Joan Miró and André Masson, who both met and became involved with Breton. with Freud’s influence still taking place, Breton had experimented with automatism through writing in order to create words with no thought or planning. In

In the year 1925, Ernst responded to automatism with practiced frottage, using cracks in a floorboard as the surface underneath his drawing paper. He adapted the concept to oil painting, spreading pigments on a canvas and then scraping. Ernst’s 1927 painting Forest and Dove used this technique. 

Another artist was Jean Arp, Jean was regarded as one of the most versatile artists of the beginning of the 20th century and was also associated with both Dada and Surrealism. He expressed himself using  sculptures, paintings, drawings, collages and poems. Through his work, he became best known for his sculptures characterized by wavy lines that he often referred to as the “organic abstraction”. Jean Arp embraced a chance and spontaneity as integral components of the artistic process. While many viewed his work as non-representational, it was rather firmly rooted in nature. As a co-founder of the Dada movement, many of his  organically-inspired sculptures, in the first Surrealist exhibition in 1925, played an integral role in linking the two movements, at the same time shaping the future of Surrealism.

One of the most famous and well-known surreal paintings is that of the American painter Leonora Carrington, who was a bold artist. She managed to establish herself as a key figure of Surrealism despite the discrimination of her male peers. Many male artists of Surrealism were rather misogynistic. They would solely acknowledge women as a mere sexual desire and object. Women such as Leonora Carrington depicted the deeper female experience, particularly in male-dominated societies and environments. In this self-portrait, she explores her femininity by creating a mimesis between her and a hyena, relating herself to the animal’s rebellious nature.

Another famous painting revolving around surrealism is the “Harlequin’s Carnival”, it is considered to be one of the major surrealist artworks created by Joan Miro. The painting was exhibited during the collective exhibition “Surrealist Painting” in 1925 at the Pierre gallery in Paris. Surrealist artists such as Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Klee, Man Ray and  Pablo Picasso also exhibited their work along with Miro. The painting was inspired by the Miro’s hallucinations when he was in experiencing difficulties and struggled to eat his fill. The apparent jumble of random items together is actually the fruit of a meticulous composition, as Miro’s preparatory sketches prove.

Sigmund Freud: The Uncanny

Over 100 years ago, Sigmund Freud wrote a paper that became famous and influenced many aspiring artists, this paper was called “The Uncanny”. 

Freud’s theory was rooted in everyday experiences and the aesthetics of  culture, the theory related to what is frightening, repulsive and distressing. His paper tackles the idea of horrific concepts, including inanimate figures coming to life, severed limbs, ghosts, the image of the double figure, known as doppelgangers. The theory lends itself to art, literature and cinema. 

The Uncanny is written in two parts. Part one explores the etymology of the words ‘heimlich’ and ‘unheimlich’ (homely and unhomely). The second part of the paper consists of Freud tackling people, things, self-expressions, experiences and situations that best represent the uncanny feeling. Freud’s most popular example is the short story of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’, a short tale that many parents would tell their children to encourage them to behave and go to sleep when told. The story goes that the child must be asleep for the Sandman to put sand in the child’s eyes–if they’re not asleep by the time he arrives, he would take their eyes as punishment. The protagonist is a boy named Nathaniel whose fate eventually does fall to the Sandman, losing not only his sight but his sanity, then his life. 

Sigmund Freud believed that the removal of eyes alludes to a fear of castration, but the castration complex is masked by a fear of losing a different sensitive organ: the eyes. 

Examples of The Uncanny

There are many examples in the world of situations that can provoke an uncanny feeling, such as inanimate objects coming alive, thoughts appearing to have an effect in the real world, the doppelgänger effect, illustrations of death, ghosts or spirits, and involuntary repetitions. The uncanny arises when childhood beliefs we have grown out of suddenly seem real. 

The Uncanny in Art

In the artistic world, waxwork dolls, automata, doubles, ghosts, mirrors, the home and its secrets, madness and severed limbs are frequently mentioned throughout Freud’s “The Uncanny”, the theory helped to influence painters and sculptors to explore these themes and blur the boundaries between animate and inanimate, human and non-human, life and death.

#illusion #illusion brief #still life #still life photography #surrealism #research #student research

[queensaba]

I got tagged by @proscrphone and @lostalotofcool thank you two so much! ♥ i will probably not tag anyone else because uhhh i don’t know so many people and i am afraid.

Rules: answer the 20 questions and tag 20 amazing followers you’d like to get to know better!

name: Charline

nickname: Charlie, mostly.

zodiac sign: Libra

height: 1,60 m

orientation: bi (most likely?)

nationality/ethnicity: German

favourite fruit: currant (from my grandmothers garden)

favourite season: autumn

favourite book: trick question, i don’t really have one book I would call my favourite above all. impulsively, i would say “tschick” (”why we took the car”) by Wolfgang Herrndorf

favourite flower: snapdragon (also found in my grandmothers garden)

favourite scent: a campfire in a summer night, strawberry marmelade

favourite colour: blue, turquoise

favourite animal: Foxes, red pandas

coffee, tea, or hot chocolate: all three, but the coffee needs to be really sweet

average hours of sleep: the dream is 8, the reality is 6

cats or dogs: both

number of blankets you sleep with: only one

dream trip: Scandinavian Countries, Scotland, a city trip through eastern europe, Canada

rules: answer the questions given to you by the person who tagged you. write 11 questions of your own.

what musician/band have you recently discovered and instantly liked? A friend recommended me the music by Mine and Fatoni. I was very hesistant at first because the album (Alles Liebe Nachträglich) has many “Deutschrap” parts and I am not a fan of that. But after a while I gave it a chance and I really love Mine and her voice and her lyrics.

what does your dream home look like and where would it be? A house in the woods, with big windows, not many rooms, an open kitchen, big shelves for my books and movies, a studio for my art would be the dream. A tiny garden where I can grow my own fruits and vegetables. A lonely place somewhere.

what takes up too much of your time? Driving to university? Or probably the thoughts about what I could and should be doing. Instead of doing those things.

what’s the most interesting piece of art you’ve seen? One Artwork? That is tough, I love everything. The dream is a day in the Rijksmuseum and seeing De Nachtwacht bij Rembrandt. I also spend only one day in the Louvre a few years ago. The Mona Lisa was truly underwhelming, but I loved the sculptures there, especially  Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss by Antonio Canova. I saw some paintings by Salvador Dalí in an exhibition and this was an experience as well! I Would also love to see paintings by Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington in Person once in my life.

what is one of your favorite smells? I love the smell of a campfire in a summer night listening to the crackling woods, eating marshmellows or “Stockbrot” (stick bread? does this exist in other parts of the world?). And I love it how the house smells after you cook marmelade. Especially strawberry jam. I could live in that smell. Another smell (a little bit odd and specific) i love: how the car smells after my dad buys coffee in the netherlands. It somehow always takes me back to my childhood.

what’s your favourite meal cooked by someone else? My grandmother cooks the best turnip cabbage in a cream dip. No one else can cook it like this and I normally hate that bland vegetable.

who’s the most interesting person in your life? I would like to say my grandmother, who inspires me everyday!

what small gesture from a stranger made a big impact on you? I just remember one story - On a train ride back from austria with my family. I was maybe six or seven years old. In our cabin was another man who asked me what my name was. After I told him that he crafted a bracelet out of an wire and gave it to me as a gift. After that he told us that he was an artists who made sculptures out of wire and so on. It was a small gesture but it showed my little version of myself that there are kind strangers out there. I still try to think that this statement is true, even though it is hard sometimes.

what popular or classic tv show/movie do you refuse to watch and why? I... don’t really have that. I only refuse to watch something if I don’t like the subject matter. Or, for example, I refuse to watch Game of Thrones because I don’t like what they do to the characters. And because it is not the groundbreaking TV show that everyone wants to make out of it.

what’s the farthest you’ve been from home? I have never been that far away. London is the farthest.

what’s your favourite saying/phrase/word in your native language? My grandmother likes to eat “Plüschprumm”, I think this word is very cute! It’s peach in “Plattdeutsch” or plush plum if you translate it word for word. Otherwise... I am not really the person for sayings and phrases and now I can’t think of a word or a phrase that I love and that I say in my every-day life.

#tagged #personal #i hope my english is not rusty at all #i finally had the time #more or less!

[johnnyuniquecreations]

portfolio review 3- Rachel Goodyear

I sent a pdf file of my portfolio to Rachel Goodyear and some questions which might help me with my work.  she has been extremely busy with her own work but it has been a honour for her to have her time and look through my work.

My questions for Rachel Goodyear 

What things do you like about my work ?

Very open, sensitive and joyful. I like the drawing style, the use of marks and the colours give them a great energy. 

What things can i improve within my work?

What formats are these usually displayed in offline? Would love to see what you could do with prints, installation, projection and zines. 

Is there any artists or subject matter which i should look into ?

Margaret Harrison - drawings, superheroes and gender politics

Claude Cahun - surrealist photographer, gender and identity

Louis Fratino

David Hoyle 

You have found a way of working that is consistent with every piece of work you do. 

Yes - but this has been a long-term process. If I want to introduce any new techniques into my work I think long-term and introduce things gradually rather than suddenly changing things so you can see a coherent flow/ it doesn’t look random.

Have you ever been asked to create a piece of work for a client to their liking rather than the way you work?

I have been approached to do this but generally turn this down. I am in the area of fine art so my way of working is create an original in the context of my ongoing practice and then this is sold to private collector or gallery collection. This is done through a gallerist (agent), so there is an understanding that a client will get in touch with them based on my previous works and style. On occasion when I have been approached for commission it is thoroughly discussed before I commit. I am happy to try new approaches with my work for a commission - especially if it a collaboration - but there always has to be a coherency in how it fits with the rest of my practice. 

How have you over come this or worked around this?

Has this ever happened to you? If not, what advice could you give?

I think a level of flexibility can be good, but if someone asks you to do something that is nothing like you’re own work, my first question to them would be ‘why’. An example of my own: I was asked to make a drawing for a book cover, but the publisher wanted something very specific in the style of another artist. I asked why they had asked me. The answer was that they knew me and knew I could draw. I politely told them that I had my own style and way of working and it was very important for me to keep my own recognisable style. I also explained that as a fine-artist I created works that were part of my ongoing explorations, style and creative language - I don’t illustrate to others’ ideas - I am trained as a fine artist, so an illustrator would be much more appropriate for that kind of job. What I did do, though, was presented some works I had already made that I felt fit with the atmosphere of the stories and agreed a fee should they want to use one of the images. They did, and the author went on to request artworks for the covers of two more publications. 

I am very influence by lot of work to do with expression with the way people use colour, marking and work which deal with identity like for drag queens and super heroes, constantly portraying peoples gender or a persona in a creative way, what things do you get influenced by which connects with your work? 

I find influences and inspiration in a number of different places. At present I have been looking a lot a women surrealist artists who were largely overlooked in their time due to the dominance of male artists at that time. Artists such as Dorothea Tanning and Leonora Carrington. I am also a huge fan of artists Louise Bourgeois and Marlene Dumas. I find a lot of inspiration from books too - The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman a particular favourite and a lot of interest in psychoanalysis and the subconscious.

Sometimes i struggle a lot trying to get out a art block and it drive me insane to get out of that negative zone, do you have  those days where you look a paper for hours upon hours and nothing happens?  if you have do you have any tips to get yourself out of the block . 

Yes! Very often! It can be quite frustrating and demoralising at times but I have learned little tricks along the way that help me work myself out of a rut. Sometimes it can be very simple like going for a walk around the block! Otherwise I will begin to draw something purely as a drawing exercise. This might be simply drawing a still life (I keep interesting bits and bobs round the studio specifically for this), or I will draw my left hand, or do a face study from a photograph or in the mirror. Blocks are particularly bad when you are trying to force ideas to come - by doing studies that do not have the pressure to be anything other than an exercise can rest the mind a little and allow more creative thoughts to flow. If I am in a really bad rut, then I dedicate time to reading and looking at other artists. Best thing I have found, though, if I have a block is to still go to the studio and if I really can’t draw that day then I read or put on an art documentary. 

I love using a different types of media to create expressive marks like for example I like using a Pocsa brush pen because It can give you some much motion and you can control the conscience of the line / marks, what types of media / tools or programs you like to use?

Are there any media, tools and programs which i should invest on getting to help me in the future? 

I’m very analogue in the way I work! I am mostly working with pencils, watercolours, inks. I like the pencil for intricate detail and control, and then mix it up a bit with loose washes in watercolour or ink. When I am making animations, the intervention of any digital programme is kept to a minimum - I make hand-drawn frames, scan them into the computer and then stitch them together into sequence in a programme such as Premier Elements. The best programme I have found for animation is After Effects, though it is a programme I don’t personally use - I have had help from others in the past to do the digital side of the animations. The way I make animations is more like a collage. 

[affairesasuivre]

Kelly Moran Shares Video For LOVE BIRDS, NIGHT BIRDS, DEVIL BIRDS

Today, Kelly Moran shares the stunning video for "Love Birds, Night Birds, Devil-Birds"-the result of collaboration between Moran and close friend Cassie McQuater. The two artists have known each other for the better part of a decade and speak the same beautiful, haunting language in this piece, which initially debuted as an immersive three channel installation spanning three 18ft walls at Transfer gallery during this year's Frieze in Los Angeles. Check out her music here!

On the visuals, McQuater says,"'Love Birds, Night Birds, Devil-Birds' started as a re-imagining of the surrealist story 'The Debutante' by artist Leonora Carrington, in which a young woman exchanges places with a hyena, masked in a suit of human skin, for her societal debut. Extravagant dresses made of anatomical parts, glass, and pink light swirl in pastoral landscapes populated by undulating fluorescent flowers, strange monsters and deconstructed birds, who paint the sky. Part of an on-going series exploring the mythological idea of women's bodies as dangerous and poisonous gardens, with references to Nathaniel Hawthorne's story Rappaccini's Garden' - the origin story of Batman's Poison Ivy.' Check out the video here!

The artists have worked on a few projects together over the past 6 months, including the visuals for Moran's recent string of sold-out live performances and the cover of Moran's latest EP Origin, which was released by Warp Records last month.

On working with McQuater, Moran has found a kindred creative spirit, a partner whose vision works symbiotically with Moran's to a deep and moving affect. "I was so thrilled when Cassie asked me to contribute music to her video installation for LA Frieze back in January - I've been a big fan of her art since I saw her paintings in college, and her work in recent years as a video game designer and digital artist has resonated with me deeply. There's always an incredible level of depth in everything Cassie creates - if you look at a single screenshot of her work, there are so many intricate details you can get lost within. The layers contained within her digital landscapes are really evocative for me as a composer because I can draw upon are several aspects of her designs as inspiration. I fell in love with her beautiful and clever game Black Room in 2017 and was so inspired by it that I ended up naming one of the pieces on Ultraviolet ('Nereid') after one of the rooms in the game, which felt like an omen for how our work would eventually collide," says Moran.

The video also marks the latest release in what has been a busy year for Moran. Aside from the new Origin EP, she has spent the past few months touring Europe and North Americaextensively in support of her Warp debut Ultraviolet, which was released late last year. She also recently released a video for Ultraviolet standout "Water Music," directed by another good friend Katharine Antoun.

#kelly moran #LOVE BIRDS NIGHT BIRDS DEVIL BIRDS #cassie mcquater #2019

[markwatkinsconsumerguide]

Consumer Guide / No.46 / writer & translator (and inaugural Translator in Residence at the British Library) Jen Calleja with Mark Watkins.

MW: Where’s home?

JC: I live in Brixton, London with my partner and our cat Ludo. I’ve lived in London for nearly ten years in total (including university), but I’m originally from Shoreham-By-Sea in West Sussex, which is where my parents still live.

MW: Tell me about your work...

JC: Well, I’m a jack of all trades really, and I’ve worked hard to be able to do that; to do a bit of everything I love and feel passionate about. I’m a writer of fiction and poetry; a literary translator from German; the inaugural translator in residence at the British Library; a columnist on translated literature; and a co-coordinator, spokesperson and workshop leader for an independent campaign tackling sexual harassment in the night time economy.

My first collection of poetry, Serious Justice, came out last year and I’m currently finishing writing my first novel. I’ve also published a number of short stories over the years and had a few writing commissions for musical and artistic projects. I’ve been a literary translator for about five years. I lived in Munich for eighteen months before starting my degree in writing and literature, and got my German to a good enough level to translate just through reading German novels and poetry. I’ve translated ten books from German so far, and I’m starting work on number 11 shortly. I’ve supplemented these jobs by editing and translating for magazines, residencies and connected jobs.

The column at The Quietus came about from wanting to be able to promote translated literature on a general literary platform; there are a few amazing translated literature focused journals and websites, but I wanted to help bring those conversations and books into the mainstream. So I pitched it to The Quietus and they enthusiastically accepted. I seek out a different language and different ‘question’ about the process, ethics or significance of a translation for each column, and I’ve always got my eyes peeled for the next one. I currently have three columns on the go.

I’m three months into a year-long one-day-a-week residency at the British Library where I’m promoting translation and the role of the translator. This is through curating a public events programme, exploring the Library’s multilingual staff and visitors through a short film, and even writing a collection of poetry inspired by the archive of poet-translator Michael Hamburger. There’s about a dozen projects I’m working on for it. It’s an amazing opportunity and it’s been incredible so far.

I’ve been volunteering as one of the coordinators and as a paid workshop leader for the Good Night Out Campaign for about a year. The campaign not only raises awareness about the amount of sexual harassment and assault that happens in bars, clubs, venues and pubs but primarily trains staff in participating premises how to react, handle and hopefully prevent harassment. It’s an intense but incredibly worthwhile role and I love doing this work. We’re in the process of rolling out the campaign across London and other cities in the UK. It’s also starting up in the US, Canada, Australia and the Czech Republic.

MW: ... your favourite piece of literature from the past and the present?

JC: In this moment I’m going to say Pale Fire, but basically anything written by Vladimir Nabokov. Could have easily been Lolita or any of his short stories. He is the master of the tragi-comedic and taught me so much about how the smallest difference in someone else and between characters can be enormous and have enormous consequences.

And from right now, even though she’s dead and it’s the centenary of her birth, Leonora Carrington’s collection of short stories The Debutante and Other Stories. It’s just come out with Silver Press in the UK and will make you feel like a child reading fairy tales for the first time.

MW: What have you most enjoyed translating ? How do you ensure such translations remain true to the original?

JC: I love telling great stories, including those that happen to have been written in German by someone else. I read a chapter I’d translated of my favourite German book at a reading event a few weeks ago and people went crazy for it, and couldn’t believe it hadn’t been translated. Literary translation for me, in brief, is getting across the same meaning even if the expressions or words wouldn’t match up in the dictionary. Word for word translation is a myth, languages can’t be mapped onto one another as every word/expression has a different nuance, history, tone in every language. Translation is technically impossible, and yet we do it every day. I could talk forever about translation.

MW: Do you prefer to construct, de-construct or destroy art - why?

JC: I have always wanted to make things and write, to express things and create art; it’s how I think about the world and how to be in it. Deconstructing makes me think of reviewing and I hate reviewing, in the most part (but not always) it’s preachy and there are too many rules to how to do it for me to be good at it or interested in it. You can’t be precious and art objects and all art has the fate of one day being destroyed. The ideas, impetus and energy behind or around something lives on of course, even if the object is gone. More art will come after the art that already exists and will override or usurp what comes before it.

MW: Is 'Girl Power', the spirit of the 90's Britpop age still around, and if so, where can it be found in UK culture today?

JC: I don’t really know much about Britpop, I was a bit too young at the time, though in recent years there’s been a lot written about how macho that period was and how that ‘girl power’ movement tried to rival this.

You won’t find much of a non-male or feminist presence in mainstream music (I’ve written before about how UK festival bills are overwhelmingly male) or if you do see a band with women in they’re treated in a tokenistic and frequently sexist way.

However, the DIY music scene right now is filled with the best punk and DIY bands who are feminist, queer and comprised of women, trans and non-binary musicians. It is seriously a weird novelty to go to a show – or should be – in the DIY music scene and see an all-male bill.

In fact, the norm in the scenes I move in is that every band will have at least one woman in, if not have multiple bands with all-women on the bill, and the people on stage and in the crowd will stand up for intersectional (anti-racist, anti-ableist, anti-transphobic and anti-homophobic) feminist values as the norm.

MW: Tell me about making music and your bands (seemingly) post-punk sensibilities....

JC: I play in a few bands, which I see as part of my creative practice and inseparable to all the other things I do. My writing has even appeared on my bands’ records and I’ve written about being in bands in my fiction and poetry.

I would refer to them as DIY punk/post-punk bands I guess; self-promoting, self-booking, self-releasing or put out on independent labels, previously self-recording, preferably playing in DIY and independent venues. Currently these are Sauna Youth (vox, sampler), Gold Foil (vox, bass) and Mind Jail (drums); and previously: Feature (vox, drums) and Monotony (drums).

I started teaching myself the drums when I was 18, and started my first (short lived but very fun) band when I was 19 at university. Over the last few years I’ve got to do a couple of short tours in the UK with Feature, and tour the UK, Europe and America with Sauna Youth, but thought I would slow down with music stuff this year; instead it seems to have ramped up. I have multiple band practices a week, sometimes in the day, so it’s handy being freelance.

There have been some really memorable highlights over the years, like supporting bands I admire in the DIY scene and beyond, playing a festival at one in the morning in San Sebastian in Spain, playing a basement show on a stormy night in Minneapolis, and getting to sing for Pissed Jeans at a festival in Switzerland. Most recently (at the age of 30) I’ve started playing the bass so I could replace our bass player in Gold Foil, while carrying on being the singer.

MW: What makes a ‘Good Night Out’ ?

JC: Going to see a show, or going to the cinema on my own and always one where harassment doesn’t have to ruin your night: www.goodnightoutcampaign.org

MW...and a 'Good Night In' ?

JC: Watching RuPaul’s Drag Race.

MW:: How do you envisage the rest of 2017 panning out for you?

JC: Finishing the novel, starting a new poetry collection, pulling off my residency projects, helping Good Night Out grow, and going on tour later in the year. Oh, and I’m getting married.

www.jencalleja.com

@niewview​

(C) Mark Watkins / June 2017

[thelondonfilmschool]

MEET THE PROFESSIONALS - Josh Appignanesi (Part 2)

MEET THE PROFESSIONALS: JOSH APPIGNANESI ON TEACHING, LIVING, AND WORKING IN LONDON

Josh Appignanesi is a filmmaker, writer, and director, who has taught and mentored at The London Film School (LFS), Arista, Script Factory, Film London’s Microwave, Guardian Masterclasses, and the Met Film School among others. We recently spoke with Josh about his latest feature, THE NEW MAN, co-directed with Devorah Baum - read the interview here. In this next part of our Meet the Professionals interview series, read on to hear more about his work at The London Film School and his take on life as a filmmaker in London.

Can you tell us a little about your involvement with LFS, and what drew you to teaching?

I started doing a workshop there a few times a year, must be over five years ago now. It was Ben Gibson who got me along – he’s now the director of the Berlin Film School (DFFB), but at the time he was the director of The London Film School. I’d done some teaching before, at different institutions and training things, and this was a little workshop I’d concocted after my last film (THE INFIDEL) came out. It’s really nice to teach, in little bits. Particularly when it’s practical teaching, it’s not long-form teaching where you have to assess things over numbers of weeks. it’s really fun, as a teacher, to just jump in and do two days with some really interested, excitable students who want to be there, who have chosen to be there for that weekend. And it’s a really diverse workshop, as well, because it’s not just filmmakers – you get artists, you get graphic designers, writers, journalists, people from the corporate world, people from advertising and commercials…. All kinds of people show up at all different levels. Some are really experienced as well, people who’ve made features before, or have made documentary features and are kind of transitioning into fiction films.

The workshop is called Visual Storytelling, and it’s sort of how you tell a story through pictures. Over the last few years it seems like more and more people from diverse walks of life want to know about that, you know. Maybe they make music videos and they want to get into kind of proper storytelling, maybe they make documentaries… It’s a really cool course, it’s gotten really fun. And that was the main thing - I’ve done a few other things in the past, and I might look to teaching some new stuff at the LFS, but the visual storytelling one seems to go down quite well. It’s just a really vibrant, fun place to come and do a couple of days, it’s very practitioner-led, and it’s good to do.

Did you go to film school yourself?

I actually didn’t go to film school, no, I just sort of started doing it. I do sort of slightly regret, now, not going to film school – I did apply to a couple of film schools, I didn’t get in, I think what you’re supposed to do is just keep applying, but I just went, “I’m too cool for school, I can just do it myself.” I guess it all worked out in the end, but what I miss from not having gone, I suppose, is this sort of sense of a cohort and an institution that’s behind you, a sort of peer group around you. It was something that I had to build myself, and I think it maybe took a little bit longer to do that. So no, I didn’t have that formal training. I did do quite a few long form courses, particularly in screenwriting, that gave me a kind of formal grounding, particularly in the screenwriting side.

And where did that training take place, where were your earliest filmmaking experiences?

There was a course called North by Northwest. It was brilliant, it was a residential course in Denmark with all these tutors from USC, which is a great film school in America, I learned a lot from those Hollywood guys. And then there was another course here which was called Arista, which was again a residential 1-week writing workshop, that was really great. I actually ended up being a tutor on Arista – it’s sadly gone now, but it was one of the best in the UK. Those are the two main ones. Someone should definitely try to resurrect those kinds of medium-length writer training, it’s invaluable, there’s a gap. But otherwise it was just me and friends making shorts and trying to get bits of funding…

What advice would you have for anyone graduating soon from LFS, or has maybe already graduated, and is looking to start making their own films, collaborating with other people…What advice would you have in terms of the early days?

It was hard when I started out, and it certainly hasn’t gotten any easier. It’s different. My very early career was, I wouldn’t exactly say pre-internet, but it wasn’t the world it is now, social media and the web being everything it now is. Which obviously makes some things easier, we couldn’t have made this last film (THE NEW MAN) without what the internet allows you to do in outreach and speed, and what new technology allows you to do. But on the other hand, it was a bit quieter, in terms of your own internal noise and headspace. Still, I think the advice is the same.  Everyone knows the basics: you keep trying to make your stuff, collaborate with people you like, find your voice, reach out to people... You have to keep trying to promote yourself, unfortunately, which is a horrible bit of it, but it is part of it. And to be honest, it never ends. I guess the one bit of advice I’d say is that there is no place that you finally get to, where you feel secure about your career and you feel that everything’s working brilliantly. It’s always ups and downs, and sometimes it can feel like it’s mostly downs. And that includes questions like, how do you make money? Which is a really tough one, and one that most people I know working in media and the arts don’t really have an answer to. Sometimes you get some money, sometimes you don’t. So I don’t know how helpful that is, but it’s my experience, anyway.

Outside of THE NEW MAN, what projects are you working on currently?

I’m working on far too many projects, actually. Several new script ideas… most advanced is the film that I’ve actually now shot most of, working with a producer called Jacqui Davies. It’s a film that we shot around Tate Liverpool, around an art show – it’s a quasi-fiction, it has sort of documentary elements in it, but it’s basically fictional. Kind of an artist’s film – it has one foot in the artist’s film camp, one foot in the fiction film camp. And it’s pretty bonkers, it’s a romantic thriller at heart,  inspired by the work of Leonora Carrington. She was one of the great surrealist painters of the 20th Century but isn’t as well-known as some of the others, mostly because she was a woman, and also because she lived in Mexico. She died recently, but 2017 is her centenary year, and there’s quite an effort to rehabilitate her. This film features her work and is inspired by her, although it doesn’t focus on her life. It focuses on the life of a writer called Chloe Aridjis, who is the star of the film but she’s normally a novelist, by no means an actor, which makes things interesting. She’s a Mexican-American novelist who lives in London. It’s kind of a gothic romantic thriller set in the art world, and shot on these beautiful antique video cameras I’ve resurrected… Yeah, it’s pretty crazy. That’s my next project that’s coming out. The rest is all script ideas, in development. Most of the ideas that I’m having at the moment are me trying to get a handle on the incipient fascism that seems to be just bubbling out of every orifice of the world right now, in this really depressing way. Maybe I need to make a comedy about it.

In terms of balancing new projects with promoting THE NEW MAN, how do you manage your own time?

I have no time. I’ve had no time for a few years now. No, I don’t find it easy to manage anything, it’s just all a massive, endless spiral of stuff coming at me, and I’m just about keeping my head above water. But that’s a good place to be! It’s tough juggling all this stuff, for sure, but I wouldn’t want it any other way, really.

What first inspired you to make films?

Well, I’ll tell you when I first fell in love with films – obviously it was a gradual process, but there was this one particular incident. When I was about 16, I got home really late from this night out, and I turned on the TV. And there was just this completely hallucinatory film, I’d never seen anything like it, and it was weird, and I wanted to go to sleep but I just couldn’t stop watching this crazy film… It just haunted me, but I never found out the title because I’d missed the beginning, but it stayed with me for years. And then a few years later I discovered it was THE SACRIFICE, Tarkovsky’s masterpiece, and you know, I was then a huge Andrei Tarkovsky fan…

But the mystery of that film, in a way that can’t quite be repeated now because of the internet, all the information is just out there. Back then I would have had to go out and buy a copy of yesterday’s newspaper to find out what the film was, or something, and that was sort of too much research for a 16-year old boy to do… I think the mystery of those times, and the mystery of that film, somehow combined in that moment. And I feel like I’m trying to get back to that sublime experience, but who knows if that’s possible?

What inspires you about working and living in London?

It’s obviously a really buzzing, inspiring place full of interesting people doing great stuff… To me, it feels like it’s not a choice, really. I couldn’t constitutionally survive outside of a big metropolis – maybe New York, I could do, maybe Paris, a couple of other cities, but… it’s basically London and New York for me, given that I’m English language-speaking. And now, more than ever, in this political climate – I just feel like big diverse cities are a question of the survival of humanity, without them we’re really not in a good place. I’m a city snob, I love cities. And then mountains.

What is the most challenging part of your job, and what are your processes for working through it?

Just sort of…self-doubt, or something. Not to just sink into total defeat, and self-hatred. I think that’s the most challenging part, and I think I just… rant. I think I rant, and then maybe have a drink, or something? I don’t know, I don’t have the answer to that. I seem to keep going anyway, so there you go.

Who, living or dead, would be your dream collaborator?

God, that’s impossible. My dream collaborator… I very much like Tilda Swinton at the moment, I guess you could say her. Yeah, I’m really into Tilda Swinton at the moment, just really impressed with what she’s doing. She’s fantastic.

For more information about Josh’s workshop at the LFS, click here. THE NEW MAN is on limited release now and available on-demand from January 23rd with a countrywide screening at Picturehouse Cinemas on January 24th. Connect with Josh at @JoshAppFilm and his website.

Written by Laura Nucinkis.

Photo Credits: The Creative Life Film Co.

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