A is for Art

It is hard to write about right now. It is, to a large extent, still under the water.

It is in some ways also improper to write about, now.

I have mentioned here before that every dozen or so years my art, well, goes away, goes deep into the dark, where it changes. I would say where it is transformed, except I have no conscious idea of it. I can't tell from here what is going on.

But I know something is. For one thing, my daimon has resurfaced recently, in a changed form very much full of enthousiasm (mind that old spelling) and energy. And I have been devouring art with a similar kind of energy myself. I've been especially enamoured lately of certain Russian picture-book artists.

Like Gennady Spirin, not that I haven't known about him for ages. (I couldn't find a proper website for him, but googling his name will call up all kinds of lovely pictures.) This one is from his book The Sea-King's Daughter:



Or this one from Olga Dugina, from her illustrations for The Thousand and One Nights:



She and her husband Andrej Dugin usually work as a team (and don't ask me how they do that), as in their illustrations for The Adventures of Abdi, written by Madonna:



Now Vladislav Erko (or Yerko) is Ukrainian, not Russian, true. But his work (which I found through Midori Snyder's blog) has the same sort of strange hyper-surrealism, I guess you could call it, though I don't much like Surrealism from back in the day. Well, unless we're talking Remedios Varo, then, well.



And then a couple weeks ago I was very, very, very lucky to stumble across the website of Elizabeth Littman. That's her married name, I gather; back in the day I knew her work from a couple of Pern covers that she'd signed Elizabeth Malczynski. That was all I'd ever seen of her work, though I love love loved it. Luckily she'd signed the art in nice big legible handwriting because I'm not sure they even credited her in the book itself. Apparently she dropped out of the art world for a couple of decades to raise her children. But look at this:



So we've got detail, strange things being done with scale, these lovely colors, patterns, a measure of abstraction; all of which make them very dream-like, very vision-like.

And all this is being distilled somewhere deep within me. I can feel it, well, not blending together, as art isn't, really, about taking other peoples' styles for our own; more that all those artists' art have those things in common, something that I am recognizing as my own emerging style. Who's to say what is influence, or borrowing, or even inspiration? I think it's more recognition. At least as far as this kind of artistic transformation goes.

I said above that it is in some ways improper to talk about this right now, though I am doing so because it is fascinating me. But right now whatever, wherever my art is, it is shy and skittish, like that kitten in my dining room. I don't want to spook it, to expose it to the world too soon. It will need to come out in its own (probably sweet) time.

But something is happening, certainly. I can tell from looking at him, my daimon. He is ahead of the curve, just a couple steps into the future of things if you will. For he is the bridge, the messenger between unconscious and conscious, between the rich deep dark and the bright light of day; and so he sees things before I do a lot of the time. That he has changed so recently and so dramatically means the art cannot be far behind, because that is what he is bringing with him this time (among other things, many other things; this is all of course complex and multi-layered and recursive, in some ways). Or that is what it feels like, at any rate.

I guess we'll see.