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Yes, I've seen the 'shelf' type loo in Holland too. And did Dutch loos seem 'higher' than ours to you, or was it just me? I put it down to the fact that Dutch people seem taller than the Brits.

All these decorated poo stories make the Italian 'artist' who canned his excrement seem decidedly pedestrian . . .:heh:

Carole
 
Paintings of Horror and Mystery ...

Reading about people seeing spooky 'faces' in tapestry/wood has got me thinking - can classic/medieval/modern paintings deeply affect you? I am not referring to ghost book illustrations, I am talking about great artists like Hieronymus Bosch ("The master of the monstrous... the discoverer of the unconscious." -- Carl Gustav Jung), or El Greco.

Here's an example: 'Hell', the right wing of The Last Judgement triptych by Bosch:http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/bosch/judge/

Posters are invited to attach images or links so that everyone can feel the awe...
 
Goya had his moments. Take a shufty at The Caprices...
 
Love 'em.... especially Bosch#'s Tree man with his spikes piercing his sides poor thing :-(

There's a painting of a brocken man/shadow thing which I find awesome in this sense.

Kath
 
When in Lyon recently I went to the musee de beaux arts and saw an exhibition of paintings by an artist whose name escapes me but they were horrible!!

Maudlin, gruesome, sentimental Victorian morality peaces with an air of gloom about them. One in particular had the tag-line 'Voici le nuit, le mort' and depicted an old hag holding a dead child in her arms chasing another terrified child down a corridor while through niches in the wall, grim troll like character leered and laughed. A google has failed to find the artists name.

Francis Bacons' Pope Innocent X is quite horrible too.
 
Re: Paintings of Horror and Mystery ...

Here's one of my favorites. For some reason that horse really creeps me out. The demons don't bother me though.

I've always loved Bosch's pictures. They're delightfully twisted.:madeyes:
 
i always found leo da vinci's johmn the babtist quite frightning. particularly the unnatural way the body is contorting...just look at the neck.
it looks like the head is not attached to the body and being placed there and screwed into place by an invisible hand of some sorts lol. reference to the babtist's beheading? not sure.

have also read that its possible this painting was a product of one of da vincis students (at least partly)

P
 
who paint ed that oen of the woman nailing her nhusbands head to the floor?
 
Since we've drifted onto the subjects of beheadings and vengeful women I thought I'd share another one of my faves:
Judith Beheading Holofernes. I just adore that Judith, don't you?:D
 
Bannik said:
Since we've drifted onto the subjects of beheadings and vengeful women I thought I'd share another one of my faves:
Judith Beheading Holofernes. I just adore that Judith, don't you?:D

I love the expression of concentration and slight puzzelment on her face. She looks like she's thinking something like 'Is there always this much blood? it doesn't look like this on the statues.'

Cujo
 
Or "God, does he have to make that horrible sound?"
 
I was googling for Fildes' 'The Doctor' recently and found this bloke.
Charles Peterson

He paints watercolours of American scenes featuring 'ghosts' which represent memories of how life was in years gone by. Sort of Norman Rockwell meets The Sixth Sense.

Creepy! Not spooky. Creepy!
 
I agree about Bosch and Goya, and actually (embarassingly!) think that the Chapman's brothers' "defacements" of those Goya prints are excellently spooky in their own right.
The likes of De Chirico and Ernst and Dali also (i find) have a lot of "horror and mystery" to them...
 
This one by Goya freaked me out as a kid, it was in a book of Myth and Legend my father had.
EDIT for some reason some early 20th C conceptual art spooks me out too.
 
Nice one, Marion! I read somewhere that Goya had that particular painting hanging in his dining room . . . :)

Carole
 
I always liked Hogarth's series 'Marriage a la Mode' and 'A Rake's Progress'. Nice cautionary tale stuff.

The last one in the Rake's Progress series always fascinated me. It's not particularly horrific, I suppose, but the portrayal of all the bedlam inmates is interesting. Wonder if Hogarth actually visited Bedlam?

http://www.haleysteele.com/hogarth/plates/bedlam.html

Carole
 
Apparently Hogarth visited the place to get sources for the picture, since there are quite accurate representations of the architecture, most notably the then new railings which separated the 'curables' from the 'incurables' wing (back right of the print, back left of the painting)
 
I loooove Goya, I have one Hogarth, Joe Coleman can be creepy/disturbing, yet one of the ones that has disturbed me the most, sorry but the title escapes me, was painted by the woman who wrote "Harriet the Spy." She wrote under a psuedonym [sic], so I can't even tell you her real name.
I was told that her estate [she passed away] does not like to associate her as "the Writer" with her as "the Artist." I guess they feared freaking people out with how strange her artistic visions were.

I believe I even saw one being hawked on eBay as a "haunted" painting.


Trace Mann


ps. No one voting for Walter Sickert? Hate of Patricia Cornwall [Cornwell?] must run deep!
 
It's not MEANT to be scary, but....

Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World" also bugged me out, and I have no good idea why. Something about how her posture is towards the house. Almost like she just heard something and is waiting for someone or something to come out of the house!

Trace Mann
 
Personally, I like the concept of Goya's Black Paintings. This website is dedicated to exhibiting them online roughly how they would have been on the walls of his house:

In 1819, Goya was 72 years old and nearing the end of his productive, yet trouble-filled life. Having become completely deaf at age 46, living through the violence of the Napoleonic Wars and the turbulence of Spanish politics after the defeat of Napoleon, Goya developed an embittered attitude towards the possibilities of human society. He moved into a simple rectangular, two-story house outside Madrid with his 30 year old companion, Leocadia Weiss. The "Quinta del sordo", or "Country-house of the Deaf-Man" was named after a previous owner who had also been deaf. Living outside the city made Goya's cohabitation with Leocadia less obtrusive to the social mores of Restoration-era Madrid.

Goya proceeded to decorate the "Quinta del sordo" with some of the most intense, disturbing images ever painted. Executed in oil directly on the plaster walls, these so-called "black paintings" represent the culmination of Goya's artistic efforts. They combine the freedom, or "Capricho", and eerie imagery of his etchings with the scale and decorative purpose of the tapestry cartoons he executed early in his career. After almost two hundred years, they retain their capacity to reduce the viewer to shocked silence.
Goya did not title these works, and although art historians have supplied their own titles, I have not identified the paintings by these names in this exhibition. Rather than prejudice your perception, I prefer for the images to speak for themselves, as they did in the "Quinta del sordo". In this way, I hope to convey the full sense of frightful awe, the eternal significance engendered by these ultimate images of Francisco de Goya.

The fourteen paintings shown in this exhibition are those originally exhibited in Goya's Quinta del sordo. Executed in oil on the plaster walls of the cottage, they were removed to the Prado Museum in Madrid in the late nineteenth century. Quinta del sordo was a two-story, rectangular building, but art historians are unsure of the precise floorplan. However, the relative placement of the paintings themselves as shown in this exhibition is in accordance with art historical research. The paintings, in the "full wall" screen displays, are in proper size proportion relative to each other, at a scale of 2 pixels = 1 centimeter.


http://www.artchive.com/goya.html
 
Max Ernst's collage novels are wonderfully strange, and pop up in FT from time to time. Most of his paintings are great too, especially the ones in his landscapes / imagined forests period.

Also anything by De Chirico, Leonora Carrington, the doll stuff by Hans Belmer is weird (but rather disturbing!), Francis Bacon maybe.
 
What's the picture with the Night Mare and the Goblin called?

edit - Sorry, that was me being lazy. It's called The Nightmare.

It's not Art, but when I was about 13, we had two old spinisters living next door to us. They were incredibly well off, but totally batty. They had a huge house, that was later turned into flats :( full of beautiful old furniture. Amazing stuff. Anyway, in one of the bedrooms, they had a picture of Christ, like the imprint on Veronica's veil. The eyes were closed, but the small inscription at the bottom of the picture said that if you stared at the eyes for (I think it was) 30 seconds, you would see them open. So I did this, and they did. It was quite something. They opened slowly, like someone opening their eyes when waking up. The whole thing was only about A4 size. I thought that picture rather clever.
 
Rrose Selavy said:
Arnold Bocklin - Isle of the Dead . Favourite of the Surrealists, Adolf Hitler and myself.......

http://www.cstone.net/~irksome/Bocklin.jpg

Never seen that before. In fact, being fairly ignorant about art i've not heard of Bocklin... Wish it was bigger - looks very cool. Is there a connection/influnce between this and Rachmaninov's 'Symphonic poem', The Isle of the Dead i wonder?
 
I would very much like a reference on Louise FitzHugh's supposed pseudonym and her haunted paintings.

One thing I can tell you is, "Louise FitzHugh," the name under which she wrote *Harriet the Spy,* *Suzuki Beane,* etc., was *not* a pseudonym, as her father was named FitzHugh.
(Go here http://www.purple-socks.com/regard.htm for biographical and critical information.) However, the paintings described in the *Village Voice* article sound plenty disturbing! You can tell by looking at her illustrations that she was more interested in revealing character and interior states through line than in photorealism or beauty in her art, which is a good starting point for creating creepy effects, but I can find no reference to a pseudonym anywhere.

I wonder if you're not conflating FitzHugh with another author - and if so, who that would be. I'm not doubting your truthfulness here, merely your memory. I confabulate out the wazoo myself, and I've seen authors conflated before. (I once met someone who insisted that P.L. Travers and Anne McCaffery were the same person, but was coy about his source; since both authors are tolerably well-documented this is, shall we say, unlikely.)

Certainly there's a visceral appeal to the notion of the author whose climactic life advice in her most famous work is "Sometimes you have to lie, but you should never lie to yourself" leading a double life; and to a certain extent, like most homoerotic people of her time period, she did. But the pseudonymous artist who is hidden by those administering her estate sounds like a fantasy persona to me.
 
"confabulate out the wazoo "


just to be irrelevant for a moment, can I nick this? I have the urge to do a birthday card for a friend with this embroidered on it.....


Kath
 
stonedoggy said:
"confabulate out the wazoo "


just to be irrelevant for a moment, can I nick this?

Certainly, if it will be useful to you.
 
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