Y a-t-il autre chose ? Pencil and pastel on tone paper, standard metric ‘CM’ size (35×25 cm)
“I will reward you very handsomely,’ said the Wolf, ‘if you pull that bone out for me.’ The Crane, as you can imagine, was very uneasy about putting her head in a Wolf’s throat. But she was grasping in nature, so she did what the Wolf asked her to do.”
Marion Crane, a working girl, gives in to her impulse of madness and greed by stealing a large wad of bills which she was sent out by her employer to bring to a bank. When leaving the city in her Ford car, she stops at an intersection and is observed by her employer crossing the street in front of her, who gives her a puzzled look when she distractedly greets him, as she had claimed she suffered from a head cold and would go straight to bed after delivering the money to the bank. In the end, on her voyage to the place where here love interest lives, and to whom she would bring her stolen money as a dowry, she falls prey to a mother fixated bird taxidermist who knows very little about birds, except that they eat a tremendous lot, and that they make for better stuffed specimens than beasts, as they are somewhat “passive to begin with”.
Lila Crane, Marion’s sister, sets out to find Marion again in the city of the mighty Phoenix, were Marion travelled in order to build herself a nest, set herself on fire, and renew herself.
This drawing is a dream image where Lila finally meets her sister in the flesh and alive, but transformed into a were-bird, and is given the opportunity to inquire about her large beak and the double-wattle under said beak, which, some people say, has the function of storing little fish and water insects to feed the crane’s offspring with, but which is in truth an ornamental organ which shrinks or elongates, according to the crane’s mood.
People point her out On the street “See, that is a good wife, whatever that is!” And the birds, the ones Who become hopping things On entering their nests, sing:
Pee, pee, see, see? A good wife Is the gyrating flying silky feathered thing, Which becomes a hopping thing On entering her nest, and her husband’s Pride and joy she is!
Whatever she is, a good wife she is! And whoever hears the birds sing thus, Or whatever, knows so well what it means The musical piping, which so resembles The Whatever That Is Good Wife’s undulating ululations
The Great Carefree Life (Dorette lächelt), pencil, pastel on pink tone paper, A4
This drawing represents a merging of different concepts of past-century commercial art in a new format and humble pencil based execution. The body of the nude and the chair model it is sitting on are copied from a painting by the painter of highly refined and culturally significant glorified and painterly pin-up, Marcel René von Herrfeldt. The anthropomorphic dog concept is as old as humor and cats and dogs in art (see also anthropomorphic cats), but best exemplified by the work of Carl Robert Arthur Thiele (popularly referred to as Dackel-Thiele, Katzen-Thiele). To mirror the Anglophile tendencies in German and Austro-Hungarian high culture before and between the wars, the tapestry design in the background is taken from the 1935 film “The Thirty-Nine Steps”.
* * *
He walked along the private street leading to the Hildebrandts’ mansion, shrouded in darkness. He remembered that it was Thursday, the day of Abercron’s strange soirées. It occurred to him that he should warn Dorette, in case she had not already been arrested. Perhaps he would warn her, perhaps he would simply relish the idea that in front of this house every minute the criminal investigators should turn up. He did not know. (…) “Mr. Abercron”, cried Steegen, while trying to find his way towards him through the crowds. Suddenly, he saw Dorette. He wondered how it could be that he had not noticed her right away, as she was such an extraordinary apparition in the packed room. She sat there, smiling, and listened to Mr. Schwarzer. (Walther Haarich, Dorette Smiles, Ullstein, 1930)
The Right Man (pencil, pastel on pink tone paper, A4)
This drawing, like any other drawing, perhaps needs no introductory or explanatory words. An association might be noted here: the depicted situation seems thematically linked to a surrealist distortion of a dinner scene in the Luis Buñuel film, “The Phantom of Liberty”. Social interaction at the dinner table is linked to waste disposal, which means defecating together, the act of eating is an isolated act, like in contemporary western civilization the act of going to the toilet, with special architectural arrangements guaranteeing privacy (the cell, the cubicle, an enclosed space, closet, Klosett). Depicted here is a man sized cubicle designed for the man to privately emanate his masculine sense of power or perhaps also secretly admire or masturbate his private part under the nice slab of marble designed for him to rest his big hands on (hand depiction inspired by a description of the hands of Hermann Göring, as manicured hairy paws, by the German author Carl Haensel in his book “Der Nürnberger Prozeß, Tagebuch eines Verteidigers”. The depicted person is not Hermann Göring though, but the largely forgotten German actor Paul Hartmann, an interesting name, like Paul Toughman.
Special Investigator K-9 Pencil on pink tone paper, A4
This drawing is based on a film still from the 1988 Steven Seagal vehicle “Above the Law”. He is striking a somewhat striking posture with a manly thumb hooked under the belt of his blue jeans, and a very interesting way of holding the handset of a public telephone while leaning against its sturdy metal body, tagged in a very haphazard fashion with various names, among them, standing out due to size and color, the name “Aline”. Also featured, a star of Betlehem.
Although largely done in pencil a few highlights are added in the colours blue and red. Steven Seagal’s head is replaced with that of a German Shepherd – the idea of making the head of a male protagonist a beast’s head is of course epitomized in various illustrations to the story, The Beauty and the Beast. The idea is to underscore the fact that manliness, especially its sexual aspects, expresses itself best in animal attributes, the whole world of masculine sexuality being anti-social, anti-civilization, etc., and the reality of the sexual act being a bloody business with death as an end result (see also, the wolf man).
General impression of blotchiness of the reproduction comes from discoloration, curliness or waviness of paper, stemming from excess humidity, water damage, hand grease. The paper used is of extreme thinness, like letter paper.
Dead Father Cryogenic Institute in Chinese Landscape, 30×60 cm, oil on STYLEX prefabricated canvas&stretcher
This is another effort in a planned series of paintings in the classical Chinese style. Based on elements from Ming Dynasty landscape paintings, it features a Cryogenic Institute, a stylized 1920 Ford Runabout, a family of water buffalos, perhaps the C.O.D. – appointed custodians of the Dead Father Cryogenic Institute, a storage facility for the dead fathers of a past human civilization, first featured in a ca. 2003 airbrush painting as the “Wilhelm Reich Cryogenic Institute”. The narrative of legendary purport of the painting is however only a pretext for a kind of painterly exercise, in the style of what the civil servants in various Chinese dynasties turned to painting as a kind of unpaid profession (a very much glorified hobby), and their masterworks were often mere exercises in the style of a colleague in another part of the huge empire. These paintings were scrolls, and mostly stored in shelves, to be unrolled, like books, to be scrutinized, evaluated, perused, in solitude or together with esteemed guests. Eventually, they ended up in one of the Emperor’s huge art vaults, who had a strong believe that his empire was only as strong and long-living as the art works created under its auspices by its servants.
This painting is of course permanently unrolled, mounted on a mass produced stretcher, painted in contemporary oil colours. It is in this way only a nostalgic simulation, but also an exercise.
This image would need no further comment, if the idea of the comment was merely to describe or amplify that what is shown in the image. What is shown lies on a plane where laughter, sighs, and giggles reign. A poem or song would be better suited to accompany this drawing of the salon or bidet variety.
The artist feels however inclined to add that the scenery depicted has very little to do with the Comte Ory storyline of Verdi’s opera buffa, but is indeed showing members of a dance troupe passing the night in a castle unwillingly offered to them as a shelter for the night by an oddly motivated aristocratic owner, who is torn between his own ingrained hospitality and the knowledge that harm will befall his guests because the castle is also claimed as a hunting ground for young female victims by his vampiric brother, who, being undead, naturally has no legal claim tho the castle, inherited by his surviving brother. The drawing owes its peculiar charm from the fact that it is based quite closely on a still from the Italian Gothic film “L’amante del vampiro” by the otherwise not very well known Renato Polselli. Casting for the film involved Gino Turini who put in part of the money for the film and Hélène Rémy as the film was originally going to be a co-production deal with France. Writer Ernesto Gastaldi once noted that the casting of Tina Gloriani was due to her being the director’s lover at the time.
This superfluous information hopefully will not serve to diminish the effect of the one pertinent artist’s addition in the form of the hirsute mandrill face of the male protagonist. Male mandrills are of course the most erotically branded animals; they carry their propensity for sex in their brightly marked faces and their firey red behinds, while the intensity of the colours is directly linked to the level of testosterone in their bodies. Note how the two women depicted in this scene allegorically represent the two possible reactions of the opposite sex (unmarked) to such a stark display of sexual interest in the man; either amused curiosity or interest, or concern. Today and to modern audiences, this motif and its reading might seem jejune or ill-advised on the basis of enlightened disdain for traditional gender-based roles in terms of sexual initiative or competition. But this is very anthropocentric thinking. This is more about the (assumed, suggested, claimed) animal nature of things sexual, so closely related also to satanism, ritual, cruelty, neg(oti)ation of civilization and rules of civilized behaviour.
Chinese Landscape with Water Flow Research Institute, oil on ready-to-use “Stylex” canvas w/ stretcher, 30×40 cm
The ancient art of Chinese Landscape Painting aims for universal completeness and peace, just as the Chinese Empire was supposed to reign for eternity. A painting is not complete if it does not bring together the hard, the fluid, the gaseous, which means rock (the mineral world), water, sky (air, fog). Living organisms are either part of the solid world (trees), or transient, animal or human, which are few and far between. Water is the element that flows through the image, from top to bottom, uniting all, making all into one living organism. Never is there harsh light coming from one point, creating light and shadow. Perspective is mostly of the aerial type, which means things in the distance are lighter in tone, as they reach you through fog, fine mists waft between them and the onlooker.
While this type of painting is originally done with ink and a soft brush on paper, here a westernized technique is employed, using oil paints, but heavily diluted, pig bristled flat brush, on cheap, pre-primed canvas with an interesting rectangular grid. The colour scape is muted, the mood not sombre, but peaceful, fresh, cool and gentle. The family of ducks in the lower left corner find their way undisturbed into the pool at the foot of the rocks, fed by cold spring water from the heights. The institute is nestled in the middle ground, free space to the front, a rock wall in the back, top stories and penthouse reaching out for the great emptiness above.
This oil portrait of a country house named by its owner “Judge Dee” is a bit sketchy in areas, but left so by the artist deliberately, as they wanted to free themselves from the shackles that the demon of perfectionism imposes on so many struggling artists. Since the client in this case was fictitious and identical with the contractor, it was easy to reach mutual satisfaction and declare the painting an artistic, if not commercial, success.
Low Density Dwelling Unit “Judge Dee”, 47 x 34 cm, Oil on canvas-mounted wood panel in the tradition of Dix on OSSA
Note that this painting is the result of a process of emigration to the essentially free and unbound realms of Poe’s Nothingness, even though it assumes topicality by incorporating and putting forward climate-saving technology. It deals with the problems with climate unfriendly methane plaguing our wasteful society. Methane here takes the form of “clean”, renewable cooking gas produced by the bacterial decomposition of (fictitious) human waste, mixed with the stool of an assortment of hypothetical pets. This gas is not really “clean”, merely repurposed and relabeled, and great investments in absolutely airtight tanks are crucial to prevent that odourless gas from escaping into the atmosphere and further heat up this planet’s already antediluvian climate. Climate spies equipped with very expensive special cameras will regularly inspect these tanks, and record all escaping methane in beautiful false colour images and films.
If cooking is not practiced and heating in general superfluous, there are further uses:
CH4 Uses (Methane)
It is used in automobiles, ovens and water heater as a fuel.
It is used in the generation of electricity.
It is used as rocket fuel in its refined liquid form.
It is used as an antifreeze ingredient in industries.
Antitransgressive prevent strategy has three specific objectives: (1) respond to the ideological challenge of deviancy and systemic transgression and the threat we face from those who promote it, (2) prevent people from being drawn into boundary challenging behaviour and ensure they are given appropriate advice and support, (3) work with sectors and institutions where there are risks of radicalisation (hot spots, suburban abandoned areas, et al.)
The Three Strategies of Huang Shigong (Pencil, crayon, pastel, acrylics on paper, 65 x 50 cm)
Look at a brutalist office edifice with sustainable, architecturally integrated cooling and climatization scheme, dedicated to the established best practice of social work and the prevention of social disintegration by all forms of deviancy, including chronic fatigue syndrome.
See how the sculptures of three modes of transportation – (steam powered, bodily propulsion by legs, petrol based motorized solution) are forming an allegory of adaptability and the value of “getting out of the comfort zone”, to achieve better social results which will all eventually end in failure due to entropy which besets the universe and is totally against all human endeavours to create stable (“sustainable”) solutions. See also that the tricycle of the Dion et Bouton type is meant to be an immovable sculpture, bolted to the pavement, just as the Greek Riace bronze warrior is only a mass-market die-cast full scale model of one of two actual sculptures, found in 1972 in the sea near Riace, Calabria, of an actual and organic bearded warrior, and the Engine on the roof is also just a light-weight, plastic replica in slightly reduced scale. This is all architectural art of the Kunst am Bau variety, later added to the stark and elegant brick edifice which in its purer form served purer functions, supposedly.
Please note that this drawing is not only in actual execution, but also in reproduction of only middling quality. This reflects a remark by an actual social worker “social work is always and in all forms dedicated to failure”. In fact, even though in rough form, the drawing includes and merges all sorts of painterly and graphic techniques. If the artist was a Norman Rockwell this should mean that the work was supposed to shine in photographic reproduction, but this was achieved in this case, due to inferior photographic equipment and lack of photographic expertise on the photographer’s side.
Way to Work, 9.1 x 12.6 inches, pencil on yellow carton, 2022
This drawing is the recreation of a drawing from 30 years ago. That drawing was nearly identical in composition, but the figure was fully dressed. While the original was not found, presumably lost or sold, a photocopy still existed, begging in its inferior quality for the undertaking of making a new drawing, a handmade copy of the remembered original, coming as close as possible or even surpassing its original craftspersonship (perfectionism/youthful folly). Actually, even though slightly larger than the original A4, the technical execution is inferior, no doubt due to use of single mechanical pencil with HB mine and tip size 0.3 mm instead of multiple finely and variably sharpened wooden pencils of different grades.
The original clothing of the depicted person was first executed, then, by means of an eraser, removed again, and the nude body reconstructed, to achieve something of an Helmut-Newton effect, with a tint of irony perhaps, as the depicted person is not really the preferred Newton body-type. There was the idea that this could be a sort of nudist yoga teacher, but the muscular tonus is not there, nor the general width of the core which normally results from yoga practice.
The source of the depicted setting is not clearly remembered. In all probability it was inspired or rendered from a photograph of an architectural decoration project by Victor Vasarely somewhere in France, either a shopping centre or university campus.
The following is a non-realized passage concerning dress codes and where nudism would or could be placed on a scale between “casual” and “formal”.
Please observe the extant photocopy of the 1994 original:
Film School Student in Akira Kurosawa Jumper, 9.1 x 12.6 inches, pencil and Chinese white on red carton, 2022
This drawing is a medium faithful copy of an original which the artist produced in their early prime, probably around the year 1994. It is an effort to reproduce ancient charms in place of new inspirations. This reproduction was made from an old low-quality photocopy of the presumably lost original. It features a Caucasian male in front of a large library or university canteen window overlooking a Japanese garden, wearing a designer pullover (fashion statement) inspired by one worn by Akira Kurosawa on the occasion of one of his latest interviews, probably in the early 1990’s. It is drawn with mechanical pencil on the back of a French Exacompta folder in an exquisitely elegant warm red tone. Some highlights where added to the shrine and tree in the upper left corner. Grease marks will fade over time, while fold creases are original property of the medium and will remain.
The 2nd Marianne Dreams House/The House on the Borderland (Acrylics, [coloured] pencil, on two A4 sheets of “Durex” technical drafting paper)
This house is the second variation on a dream location described in the book “Marianne Dreams”, by Catherine Storr. It is a house containing a boy, inflicted by polio, who lost the will to live (or to move which according to Wolf Larsen is roughly the same), a house with barred windows at first and no interior furnishings, surrounded by encroaching rocks with evil eyes. Marianne enters the house, which she had created by drawing it with some sort of very powerful pencil, in her dreams, while herself in her waking state being bedridden with some illness but a sense of agility far surpassing the progress of her recuperation, and engages with the boy, whose name is Mark (he could have been aptly called “Mark One” had this story been set in a science fiction as opposed to a sort of fantasy setting).* She challenges him, much to his discomfort, to get out of his self-protective identification with the limitations and the confinement of his illness, and finally succeeds, after having empowered him by dreaming/drawing up an exercise bike for him to train his legs, to have them both rescued by helicopters.**
*If set in a “parodic” sort of internet and social media world of the 2010’s, the character could also be aptly rechristened “Chris”.
**For a slightly darker toned rendition of same image, please visit this address
Vize 4: Tajná raketová sila / Vision 4: Das geheime Raketensilo / Vision 4: The Secret Missile Silo, 2020 Öl auf Holz / oil on wood 70,2 x 60 cm / 27.6 x 23.6 inches
This 2020 painting harks back to several versions of the same motive, a 2006 drawing, another smaller 2009 drawing, a comparatively large painting from the same year and a later, 2012 re- or overpainting of that painting. It is based on a Heljan plastic model, the Heljan #673 N Scale Meat Packing Plant kit. While painting this iteration of the structure, one of the artist’s roughly four favorite and therefore recurring real world or model-type architectural structures, the artist was grappling with ocular clouding (encroaching blindness) and also with a newly developed (or degenerated) technique of mixing organic substances with oil paint and acrylics, applying the resulting mixture, uneven because of different solubility of its constituents, often in half dried states or different phases of coagulation, onto the canvas with brushes in varying states of distress, interspersing the emerging image with highlights of synthetic luminescent powders and pastes. In this painting the artist perhaps reached a pinnacle in the materialization of a certain style he envisioned – a style where the constant fight between the youthful wish for perfect execution and the cosmic truth of decay leads to its own results, where human mind control and the freedom of molecular motion and chemical interaction coexist, where the Jungian amateur pursuing personal narcissistic goals of alchemical omnipotency finds respite in the struggle between time-bound limitations of the human flesh with the desires of the mind and the phantasy of timelessness.*
*Timelessness of art, which Oskar Kokoschka found perfectly represented in Rembrandt’s “Self-Portrait at the Age of 63” at the National Gallery in London. While bemoaning the bombing of Dresden, visiting the National Gallery at the suggestion of his wife, he found back his inner peace at the contemplation of old skin, “like the skin of a dead chicken”, in the way in which Rembrandt understood to apply his own virtuosity in an inimitably masterful loose yet perfectly controlled application of paint, where molecular structure of the medium and chemical changes taking place in the process of drying and hardening, together with said virtuosity and sheer dexterity of application lead to a lasting and static depiction of a particular stage in a process which in the natural universe leads through life to death and complete disintegration in a matter of only a few years. **
**This anecdote is repeated here not to glorify the artist’s own desires of creating such an effect, but to humble it, as the above painting is not only a very serious effort, but also a typical example of Schlawinertum, as a surrogate to virtuosity and diligence, in contemporary art. It might be even that some hypothetical onlooker would only see the jejune and the would-be where in the eyes of the creator there is at least a glimmer or echo of the inner truth they sought, approached in baby steps which are much too short to reach their goal even within the whole lifetime of a person so encumbered by their own deviant desire for a sorrow-free life, which so often leads in truth to an inordinate accumulation of inner sorrows, often seen and belittled as minor by others, as they are sorrows of the imagination. While someone like Dostojewski, who knew exactly the interaction of sorrows of the imagination and the true sorrow of, for example, hemorrhoids, which so often result from sins of the mind, was so perfectly cognisant of the fact that nobody is entitled to define or judge the difference between imaginary or true sorrow, as their is none in degrees of pain they inflict.
The “The Most Dangerous Game” House, 29,8 x 21,5 cm, pencil and crayon on tone paper, 2019
This, the “The Most Dangerous Game” house, is a lodge for a special kind of hunter, a bearded one, who hunts the most crafty, murderous, cruel animal: the human animal. Which is the only animal with ethics and moral judgment, thus capable of revenge, not humble. Instead of fangs and claws, it has intelligence. Thus, it is the most dangerous game to hunt. The hunter type to take residence in this house has a taste for Eastern European low density dwelling architecture. The actual depicted setting is generic. A type of less dangerous game, a Bruderus Horten Noncaudatus, a flying wing-type ancient animal with an especially small brain, is flying by, unmolested. It is unclear whether the hunter is presently at home.
“Judge Dee” Country House in Carboniferous Setting, 31.5 x 23.5 cm, pencil and crayon on tone paper, 2019
This is a retreat-type home for the more benign, less damaging to the social fabric kind of hunter, the hunter for peace, quiet and solitude which he/she/it finds ideally represented in a dwelling detached from civilization by a certain distance in the fourth dimension. Thus, the person for this country home must be a time traveller to take leave from all that binds them in the now and find what they seek in a geological space and time which gave birth to all fossile fuel reserves which now fire our unpeaceful modern world, the carboniferous era.
The Abductionist’s House, pencil, pastel on tone paper, 29,7 x 21 cm, 2019
This house offers shelter for a very special kind of lover of humans, the abductionist, the John Fowlesian Collector-type. These are mostly male, for certain reasons which are difficult to specify or elucidate or trace back to either evolutionary or civilizational reasons. The collector traps another hapless human being (like the spider the fly in the parlour with the fine edgings), and keeps this hostage-type specimen under lock and key, for fear of abandonment and in the hope of by keeping this other stationary they could by pervasive and tenacious persuasion win reciprocal love. This person, as the chimney smoke indicates, and by general habit, home. The victim lives probably in the cellar. Two dogs are in a playful mood, but would alarm the house owner by raucous barking if anyone should approach. The house shares certain decorational and structural characteristics with the “The Most Dangerous Game” house, which indicates certain interesting psychological links between hunting and collecting.
For a different kind of author-approved viewing experience, you are invited to redirect here.
Co-Operative All-Togetherness Cement Plant, 2020, oil on canvas, 51,5 x 71 cm / 20,3 x 28 inches
This is a painting full of problematic content and a problematic history. In fact, the artist has since altered it in the form of adding a new brighter sky, thus completely changing its atmospheric mood, content, and “meaning”. Even this version was not the first version, because the dark sky replaced a former version of a brighter sky (since reinstated). In the end it became clear though that the artist himself had no way of determining which version was in fact bad or good or finished. It is all in the mindset.
The painting features a standard cement plant with a co-operative economic model, which by and large means, a people-centered enterprise, controlled and run by and for their members, with the function of realizing or materializing a common economic, cultural, infra-structural, civilizational goal. The plant, which could also be designated a concrete plant, is augmented by a more or less abstract floating shape which looks to be of artificial origin and crafted from a semi transparent metallic, completely unknown material. If not unknown, this material could also be described as transparent acrylics with a small amount of finely distributed embedded metallic particles. The whole tube-like construction might be filled with air and is big enough with thin enough walls so that the air inside could be heated by the sun to such a degree to ensure floating of the structure, where the metallic particles in the transparent thin transparent film constituting the outer walls of the object are light sensitive (liquid crystels?) which regulate the temperature of the air or gas trapped within in the way of a homeostatic system.
Note also the elongated pyramidical object in the window of the attached control room of the plant. This is a robot sentry overlooking the operation. This detail is also a veiled reference to the dead tram conductor in “The Thing in the Moonlight” by J. Chapman Miske.
A final note: concrete, though useful and aesthetically pleasing, is a thing of the past and present, not the future, As of the year 2070, all newly constructed structures will be made of some yetnot perfected synthetic alternative or naturally occurring building materials like wood, clay, natural stone. Like trees, concrete buildings absorb CO2. New calculations show that concrete absorbs roughly 30 percent of the amount of CO2 that cement production emits. That is a non-cooperative, planet-unfriendly balance according to the Instrumentality of SCIENCE.
Converted Chemical Laboratory with Storage Facility / Experimental Prize Pig Setting 30 x 60 cm / 11,8 x 23,6 inches, oil on canvas (prefabricated, “Stylex”), 2020
A painting, unusually tall (like modern cell phone), yet making up for tallness in smallness. Chinese inspired, in particular by the painter Shitao, the style being of course only a travesty of sumi-e, for the conversion into badly managed oil paints. Also, the painting ground in this case is industry-prefabricated and pre-primed canvas on stretcher, not paper scroll, hand mounted in fabric for either hanging in a museal context or storing in rolled form, stacked in shelves, to be perused by fellow art lovers, like books. However, the difficulties of endeavoring transformation and westernization by using oil paints on canvas make for intriguing results in terms of plastic surface effects (not well observable in photographic reproduction). A detail view shows better what is meant:
Observe how pencil line replaces insufficiently controlled brush strokes, creating not only optically observable lines, but also tiny grooves in the toothpaste-white of the supposedly tiled cladding of the storage building.
Please see also this post from 2009, with a design originally called “Bion Fermenter on the Eleventh Moon”, here moderately titled “Proposal for a Bion Conerter“.
At the Toy Car Convention / Un re in ascolto, 2019, pencil and pastel pencil on tone paper, 22,9 x 31,8 cm / 9 x 12.9 inches
Certain display options do not work due to conversion to a block type page set-up model. A new template ought to be chosen. This drawing belongs to a group of smaller and well accomplished drawings made in 2019, which deal with the topic or the author’s personal endeavour of a return to the human figure (after several years or a decade of abstaining from the depiction of human figures). Note that the human figure is a very dangerous item to depict. While from an Islamist perspective, you defy God’s will, in Western society you make certain dangerous statements with each attribute you choose to endow that figure with for the sake of desired or presumed realism. Class, as demonstrated in dress, skin color, sex, all such things have become contentious due to identity politics. It is easy to hurt someone by callously laying open the fact that the author’s inner society might not contain certain sub-species, gender types etc. or might be in some other way testament to the power of categorization. This drawing features a dog-person (the inspector), an overweight person, an unclad youthful person. All, including the dog type seem to belong to the male category, all are united in reveration of a presumably newly released vintage car model (a 1:8 die-cast scale model of a 1910 Benz Limousine) – a fetish linked to a certain sub-type of masculine sexuality. Other interpretations or readings of this image are at the discretion of the observer. It ought to be noted that the dog type is a paraphrase of an original sketch by the author Wolfdietrich Schnurre, depicting an arrogant dog of breeding, featured in the 1962 novel “Die Aufzeichnungen des Pudels Ali”. In this scene, he might not partake in the reveration process, but acts as the inspector, the arrogant non-human agent, observing two employees of the model toy car company, who might be involved in a crime of sorts.
Optimista bez otce / Der vaterlose Optimist / The Fatherless Optimist (2020) Oil on canvas on wood, 43,2 x 30,2 cm / 17 x 11.9 inches
From the Czech-titled exhibition: Nové trendy v územním plánování (New Directions in Space Planning) – – – Please note: functionality of presentation assembly on this blog has changed. The author has stopped going with the times. If this painting is a self portrait, it depicts the author much younger and richer and happier than he ever was. Colors are not well reproduced, also, the details of how the paint was applied (loosely, rather thin, on canvas primed with the addition of lots of chalk, thick enough for the canvas structure to be neutralized) are not easily discernible. A detail view of just the face will show how much more interesting it would be to look at that painting in nature, and getting as close to it as no museum would allow for.
The Fatherless Optimist, detail
Note how lips look like either result of a bodged lip job, or as if befallen by herpes simplex and badly swollen. It means that what appears light hearted and almost cartoonish in character is actually realist, or rather, naturalist in nature, trying hard to depict the nature and the rot of actual human flesh. At the same time you find touches of graphics art or the art of illustration, like the hair, scratched in with the end tip of the brush’s handle. Is this painterly?
The Abductionist’s House, pencil, pastel on tone paper, 29,7 x 21 cm
Pink, magenta, purple, are the colors most likely to excite consumer interest. Colors of this family have the right temperature, are inviting, and compelling. While this fact was discovered by the comics industry in the 1950’s, it took very long to become common knowledge among mass manipulators. Certain snap judgments stood in the way. As to content, most notable elements besides this house (designed by a real yet long dead architect, not by the author) are the two dogs in the foreground, representing the two owners of this house (a hunter couple), and the unique pyramidic tree sculpture to the left. This is going to be patented and mass produced and sold cheaply to those who prefer a touch of class and artificiality in and on their gardens and lawns. Also, these can be illuminated from withing to become glowing tree shapes in the night. People will say: “Nice touch, we like!”. The house owners seem to be active and in attendance inside their lodge, see the smoke coming from the chimney, a prop element hinting at occupation.
The Constitutionalist, 40 x 29,9 cm, pencil, colored pencil on paper
The Constitutionalist, so-called to uphold the value of a carefully set down list of fundamental values and principles according to which a state is to be run or governed, is seen parking in front of a railway station called “Rheinburg”, symbolically so, as the river Rhine is the traditional geographical border between western civilization and the teutonic netherworld, unconstitutional “Hel”. Serving as a permanent control to the permanent control value of the constitution, a floating device in the shape of a futuristic world-lantern, casting its unreal and otherworldly light on the phallic orange body of The Constitutionalist. Ideas of heliocentrism, constitutionalism, anti-dyslexia, state controlled eductation and indoctrination, etc. are all the outgrowth of a patriarchal tradition, the eternal fight against gynaecocracy.
Dyslexia, a silent deviant, an underminer of understanding Makes values crumble The book worlds tumble More proud than humble, as it is powerful
And knows its power well. But not from books. It’s eminently practical, pragmatic, But also deceiving.
Know your enemy well, the cunning one Who does not work with strategy, Whose moves are based on instincts.
Honing in on the weakness of well-read intellectuals Spineless thinkers who sold out to the written word
The Plutonian, pencil, coloured pencil, leaf silver, 39 x 29,7 cm
A compact, strong shunting engine well suited to deal with the adversities of everyday life and hard work. The Plutonian world is the opposite of the cool world. You need to be clad in special alloys and have a powerful yet simple method of propulsion in order to survive the first few meters on your way through life. It seems best not to dwell on further associative stream-of-consciousness writing, but to complement this drawing with a poem:
I did it while suffering
I did it while suffering
Medical complications
I did it while
Facing life
From the perspective of death
Surviving death
Every day
Some elementary truths
I picked up
Along the way
Littered on the wayside
Picked truths like flowers
Some hidden truths
Suppressed truths
I did it while suffering
While suffering
I did things
I lifted things
I saw through things
Elementary things
From the perspective of death
I did it.
So you, who see things
From the perspective of life
All pink, rose tinted
Don’t you dare
To criticize
Or nit-pick
What I did
Because I did it
While suffering.
The Carl Grossberg, 48 x 36,5 cm, mixed media on yellow tone paper
A detailed, if slightly crammed drawing with the theme of what our world would and could have looked like if energy independence, chemical independence, transportation independence and true man-nature metabolism had been the goal of industrialization. The drawing could also be an illustration to a treatise on “The Rift” (in the universal metabolism of nature), as described by Karl Marx. Not that the artist is deeply informed on the subject. In fact, any assumption of true literacy in any genre is categorically refuted (in accordance with the law of humbleness and common sense). Embedded in the rocky landscape background are several stylized coal liquefaction plants or chemical factories, tubes and pipelines, and one motif from a painting by Carl Grossberg (Fabriklandschaft im Schnee, 1923). Of course there is no snow here, as in fact the yellow color of the cardboard on which the scene was drawn evokes impressions of a slightly murky, warm climate (perhaps of the inner earth) with sunlight filtering through a crack in the rocky ceiling, further muted by an emission-saturated atmosphere. The drawing consists of several layers of pencil, colored pencil, washes of acrylics and different reflective and metallic pigments on a base of human spittle (which are in fact all but invisible. Note that the “inner earth / Hollow Earth” theme has all sorts of connotations, historical science fiction ones as well as the psychoanalytical/gynacocratic/chthonic idea of earth as a womb. It seems in any case appropriate to annex a quote by Bernard Herrmann, wherein he describes his ideas about scoring the Filme “Journey to the Center of the Earth” (1959), since that film features landscapes not unlike the one depicted above: “I decided to evoke the mood and feeling of inner Earth by using only instruments played in low registers. Eliminating all strings, I utilized an orchestra of woodwinds and brass, with a large percussion section and many harps. But the truly unique feature of this score is the inclusion of five organs, one large Cathedral and four electronic. These organs were used in many adroit ways to suggest ascent and descent, as well as the mystery of Atlantis.” Drawing and words (except for italicized words by Bernard Herrmann) by Torsten Slama>
The Kraftick Liquefaction Plant, 36 x 50 cm, pencil, colored pencil on tone paper
“When Germany still strived for complete autonomy and independence of Western (and Eastern…ed.) influences, coal hydration technology was one of her attempts to realise complete energy independence. Had the hydration plants not been completely eradicated by the end of World War II, their gasoline output would have served Germany’s entire private car fleet well into the 1960’s. ” National Empowerment through Petrolum (NETP)
Apart from all its pertinence to energy empowerment stratagems, this drawing should be judged on its artistic merits and technical peculiarities. Mixed media technique on tone paper makes for interesting depth effects. The pervading pink motor oil atmosphere is sometimes fought back, at times heightened. Some of the liquefaction towers are aslant. The geological rock formation on which the plant rests seems unstable. Even the thick concrete platform on which all rests cannot prevent warping. Yet maybe the warping is only in the eyes and the hands of the draftsperson. Or perceived aslantness could be an optical illusion due to the diagonal dynamics of the rock-layered landscape in the background, which works against the perpendicularness of the liquefaction towers.
In a special effort to facilitate appreciation of technique, two details are included:
This reproduction perhaps does not do full justice to the original drawing, which has a rather unusual tonality, based on the blending of so many different brands, types, and colors of the colored pencil variety, all superimposed on an already well-finished pencil drawing with rather profound dynamics in the darkness-lightness range. Thus, the result is very much like a colorized black and white drawing, giving maybe the impression of a very early experiment in colour reproduction. The thematic dedication is referring to a Catholic theologian movement which enjoyed its phase of greatest vivacity from ca. 1660 to 1700 AD. Even though the movement played itself out predominantly in France, it was based on the teachings of a Danish theologian, emphasizing, in typical Nordic fashion, original sin and human depravity. The ?-voiced Commentator “ex”plains: this engine is a very impervious juggernaut, clad in different metallic alloys, being, say, indiscernible to radar, impenetrable by all sorts of electromagnetic radiation, shielded towards the degrading effects of human depravity and all varieties of human frailty. Any kind of believe in a superior being is something like a mental armour, shielding one from the hopelessness of mortality – the machine is a materialization of the urgent desire to overcome death. People often choose suicide to overcome death. They resent their mortal bodies. They would like to have their unique minds stored in metal cylinders — so, in a very roundabout fashion (or in a very allegorical fashion, or maybe in a very freely associative fashion), this drawing could also be called “The Whisperer in Darkness”.
The engine depicted here thus might be the metallic encasing for a human soul, moving through an archetypal, pagan, or, perhaps, Stygian highland (the Gaelic haven to the Teutonic type, disappointed with their own version of a heathenist anti-western world), along some loch, or firth, or estuary, a landscape which might have formed the background to the most impressive feats of early Catholic Christianization, or Westernization.
The Unexamined Brutality (of the male Libido), 70 x 50 cm, Oil on Canvas
This painting seems to hark back to times when the male libido was seemingly more unabashed and comparative innocence (or unabashed guilt) reigned the abusive intercourse between the sexes. The aesthetics are reminiscent of surrealist inspired propaganda imagery. Phallic forms abound. One sea shell stands, or lies, in lieu of the womb. One could argue that the central phallic form of the outer shell of the engine’s boiler is actually esemplastic in not only being the threatening phallus, but also the tubular receptacle hollowness, awaiting the phallic thrust of another longish form entering (see the old chuckle arousing locomotive/tunnel imagery). The ?-voiced Commentator “ex”plains: seeming nostalgia for simpler times does not thinly veil, but starkly outline the fact that we today live in the age where all old violence and abuse bears fruit. The true objectification of the woman takes place in the immediate future which is our presence. Groping will soon be replaced by more sophisticated (and cowardly) methods of abuse. Think about artificial intelligence being furnished with female faces, names, voices. Some are discussing whether these undead freaks should be taught to give more assertive responses to weather queries mixed with risqué innuendo and sexual abuse. Few discuss who decided that “virtual” assistants need female voices and whether it is not a very small step for the brutality of the male libido to then confuse the (universal) assistance offered with the liberties allowed by sex-slavedom.
This drawing is based on a painting by the late New Zealand railway painter W.W. Stewart. The New Zealand railway station and the engine was transplanted into a landscape of possibly Triassic character and the people decorating the scenery were eliminated. More specific information about the engine and the railway line could be obtained by a knowledgeable New Zealand railway buff. This artist, in full possession of his artistic prerogative to be weak-suited in terms of research, failed to do so. The copycat artist, having confidence issues, wants to strengthen the impact or poignancy of his drawing by adding the following impromptu piece of poetry (please observe the judicially placed punctuation; a mark of poetry):
Go, Engine of Confidence, Go your way. Unencumbered by self-doubt Say it loud! You have no capacity for self-doubt.
You are long in the tooth, wide in the hip You go on every trip With confidence.
Engineered to do your best Not concerned with all the rest Your path might be crooked Perspective unsound Your wheels go round and round Until you stop.
(What follows is perhaps somewhat rambling while striving to be an encompassing description of what is already there, yet undescribed, and maybe even better left alone and unmolested by words and hearsay-facts. Uncovered, named, listed, documented sources often form a thicket under which lies buried the depth of original conception, and the factual ambiguity of the term “original”. A term which to discuss is not the purpose of the following word-thicket.)
This drawing was made to serve as a decorative side-piece for a show in a special sort of gallery, showcasing original editions of books by Bruno Schulz. The drawing’s author (the “artist”), limited in his choices by the restrictions describing his own realm of inclinations, would not have chosen this author to draw inspiration from, yet found in himself a strong urge to do “something different” (something different, of course, from what he would naturally do). So it was an appealing idea to do something according to somebody else’s wishes. So it had to be a sort of illustration. It was not to be a paraphrase of Bruno Schulz’s own, often somewhat fetish-centric drawings. It is an illustration of a detail in the short story, “The Book”, an ad for a hair tonic mentioned therein. Some pictorial inspiration was drawn from one of this drawing’s author’s favourite oil paintings, “Mourning Picture”, by Edwin Romanzo Elmer. Since the drawing’s author does not get around too much, he has never seen that painting in the original. He first came across it in a book about “Naive Kunst”. For some reason, this painting was classified as that, among numerous Yugoslavian examples, some French, and a notable German entry, Friedrich Gerlach. It was only a black and white reproduction, not particularly crisp, but the cracks in the thickly-painted clouds were still intriguingly visible.
A nom de plume was chosen for this drawing which refers to Edgar Allan Poe. So the original accent is nicely rounded off by the American influence in the form of two late 19th century American sources augmenting or instrumentalizing one Polish-Jewish, 1937 modernist, original inspiration. What this means is that it tells you something about the drawing’s author’s mindset. The artist-illustrator would also maintain that there is a certain touch of Will Elder noticeable in certain details. Which then would make for a third, second half of the 20th century, modern-popular, as opposed to modernist, American influence. The above-mentioned pen name was “Hans Pfaall” (see signature in lower left corner), lending an additional phallic touch to the drawing, already well endowed with phallic forms (eight, or nine, depending on the viewer’s susceptibility to phallic forms). A touch of quaintness is the choice of pink tone-paper, in reminiscence to a certain cheap stock of recycled writing paper, not widely available anymore. The drawing originally also featured a cat (taken from the above-mentioned mourning-painting) with very long hair, which was then erased and replaced by a multitude of overgrown house flies (Musca domestica, of the suborder Cyclorrhapha). To complete the list of references, and, in the process, to add one German influence (an addition of questionable historical and moral sensitivity perhaps), the self portrait of the painter of the Mourning Picture, sitting in a lawn chair and reading a newspaper, originally moustached, wearing a bowler hat, had his head replaced with that of a dog-creature which is a rather faithful copy of a drawing by the German author Wolfdietrich Schnurre, who illustrated his own books. This dog face, bearing the caption “Arrogant, aber von Adel”, was featured in his 1965 novel “Die Aufzeichnungen des Pudels Ali”.
Woman’s Medical Centre with 1886 Benz Patent Motorcar (Oils on canvas on wood, 50,3 x 62,8cm)
Photographic reproduction of a painting which is positioned somewhere on the borderline demarcating the difference between the entirely satisfactory with added interest, and one of the lesser efforts in the field of true painting. Due to experiments with the preparation and priming of the canvas, the behavior of the paint was unexpected. Thus the execution lacks fluency. The technically inferior quality of the photographic reproduction adds to the impression of a very strange atmosphere permeating the picture, ambiguously oscillating between moodiness and objectivism. The symbolism; moon, spiral, car, and brick, is rather balanced, but with the addition of some sea shells, it is clearly shifted into the realm of female reproduction. (Of course, this is based on highly untrustworthy assessments of gender-classification of objects. Ed.)
The building does, or at least did, actually exist, somewhere on the British Islands. The photocopy of a photograph of the building from a book on Brutalist architecture garnered at the Düsseldorf Central Library some 25 years ago exists, yet, due to negligence, lacks any inscription for further contextual elucidation of the source. So neither information on the architect nor the actual location of this interestingly proportioned edifice can be provided, much to this author’s disgust.
GPTU - 33 / IPP World Wide 