Painting the odd

There's a huge gallery of the surreal and storybook artwork of husband-and-wife team Andrej and Olga Dugin at Storyopolis, which is itself an amazing site with images from loads of wonderful illustrators. Comprised mostly of illustrations for books, the work of the Dugins includes a few surrealist paintings as well as pencil sketches, ink drawings, and watercolors, from medieval and heraldic figures to still lifes, border designs and emblems, maps, and characters from the Arabian Nights. This, incidentally, is why I think all books should have pictures. I just love their work.





Hermann Serient is an Austrian painter whose vibrant, almost garish scenes depict towns filled with colorful, whimsical, and at times menacing characters. His artwork is little like a lurid dream where everything seems bright and strange, and on the point of spinning out of control.




Painted Woman is the art of Kim Richardson. Garbed in masks, feathers, fur, horns, lobster shells, and especially the recurrent nautilus shells, the vulnerable figures in these "intuitive paintings", with dual faces, dismembered limbs, and doorways into the body, display the costumes and symbolic trappings of the unconscious.
Via Cipango.




Jay Long's works incorporate typewriter text, anthropomorphic animals, clowns and painted dolls, industral towns, trees, and everyday objects in simple, whimsical compositions. His sizeable gallery incorporates oil paintings, shadow boxes, silhouette paintings, giclee prints, and mixed media works, all of them delightful. I particularly enjoy his series of human- and animal-formed objects.




Armen Gevorkian is an Armenian painter whose lifeless, statue-like figures inhabit a cold, gray world of dark light, hard edges, and sharp points. His paintings are still and strange, eerie, and wonderful. There are a few more works along with a short essay at this gallery.





Remedios Varo was a Spanish surrealist whose rich paintings are laden with symbolism and magic. This site brings together a number of galleries displaying her work, as well as bios, articles, bibliographies, and other resources.




Reminiscent of the best of Dali and Magritte, the work of Siegfried Zademack is wonderful, strange, disturbing, dreamlike surrealism at its best. Veiled figures, odd machines, half-formed objects, statues, weights, rowboats, and mysterious women populate these fragmentary cities and empty landscapes with their endless horizons.
Via All About Nothing.





I love Tiffany Bozic's spare, stylized forms and muted palette. For some reason, her website now only points to a gallery site containing a handful of her recent works which, while quite nice, are a bit different from her older surreal tableaux of animal and plant forms. I hope her complete portfolio will be available again soon.




Susan Jamison's works are variations on a theme: a botanical body, black-veined head and pink-flowered body, accompanied by birds, insects, and flowers. According to the artist's statement, the paintings "incorporate naturalistic imagery with feminine cultural symbols and everyday objects to explore archetypes from myths, dreams, and fairy tales.... The first format, a portrait, is a classical Renaissance presentation. Medical illustrations of the head are appropriated and modified into archetypal portraits of women that appear in a dream state. They interact both passively and purposefully with plants and animals in ways that become metaphors for intimate life experience. The second kind of composition...is a proportionally neutral square. These images are designed, edited, and cropped in a way that is clean and contemporary, and yet share a sensibility with Audubon illustration, as well as traditional Asian art."




Arnau Alemany's paintings and lithographs portray solitary fragments of urban spaces isolated in empty landscapes, clustered as if into a single organism, combined with alien arctitecural forms, or suddenly and inexplicably overtaken by nature, suggesting not living buildings and cities so much as abandoned relics from another time.