Food for the Gods

^{_{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“.

© Torsten Slama and The Animal Welfare Society (Pig Dept.)

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The Plutonian

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.

Rendering © 2027 by Torsten Slama and the Shunting Society, “I did it While Suffering”, poem by Torsten Slama

The Carl Grossberg (The Rift)

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>