#colour etchings

[sleepydrummer]

Jeune Femme dans un Barque Eugène Delâtre

source: invaluable

[illuminations-of-nyx]

JAKE AND DINOS CHAPMAN

BEDTIME TALES FOR SLEEPLESS NIGHTS

http://jakeanddinoschapman.com/

"Sticks and stones

Shall break thy bones

And words will

Surely hurt you

Eyeball and teeth

Shall be wrenched by grief

As nightfall comes

To shroud you."

Jake & Dinos Chapman re-imagine the classic Victorian morality tale. While their own immorality Tales are wrought from the innocent language of children’s story books, the messages they sagely propose are far from the saccharin coated yarns familiar to this genre. The scenes these Tales depict are vivid, dark and troubling, and will have dramatic consequences on the nocturnal serenity of the reade

The Chapmans' favourite artist, Francisco Goya, once produced an etching called The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. "That phrase has long been held to show that Goya was a supporter of Enlightenment rationality and the progress of reason. But I prefer the version of that phrase by Deleuze [the French philosopher]. He said it was insomniac rationality that produces monsters. The Enlightenment has made a fetish of reason. Goya didn't and we don't."

"Goya, and the makers of all great artistic experience, is as untrustworthy as his self-portrait suggests, a man as much fascinated as repelled by disorder and sudden death,"

The Chapmans have spent years reworking Goya's most disturbing images; they even bought a set of his prints only to deface them. "Like us, Goya had a heretical approach to the body," Jake explains. He cites one of the most upsetting prints from Goya's series The Disasters of War, created between 1810 and 1820, a work entitled A Heroic Feat! With Dead Men!, in which three hideously butchered corpses hang from a tree. It's a work the brothers recreated in three dimensions, in their 1993 work of the same title. Why does it resonate for them? "When Goya put three mutilated bodies in a tree, it was read as echoing Christ's crucifixion, suggesting that some kind of redemption is possible. But you can see it another way. Goya is being quite cruel about Christian redemption, shifting the Christian iconography to show there's nothing beyond. That what you're looking at is dead bodies. There is nothing to be optimistic about. It's just aestheticised dead flesh. He looks to be giving a moral demonstration, but he's not."

"Our interest is in what adults do to children and the image of innocence they project on to them. Our thought about children is that they're pretty much psychotic, and that through sweets and other forms of coercion they are civilised. The things we've imagined in our art are anaemic compared with what kids imagine. "

[internationalemeteorologie]

Edward J. Detmold 

The monkey and the fisherman

The eagle and his captor

The owl and the birds

The lion and the three bulls

The hart and the vine

illustrations from The Fables of Aesop, 1909, London

via

[theartobserver]

Richard Serra - Between the Torus and the Sphere I-V, 2006, complete set of 5 colour etchings framed individually.