Fantasy TOP - land of best fantasies

The Adventure in the Blueberry Hole - acrylics on canvas 40 cm x 40 cm by Kasia B.Turajczyk

 Just when Blueberryer and Blueberryess wanted to go for a nice, evening walk suddenly out of the blue a golden and blue hole opened its mouth and both of them were taken into a new adventure. Maybe they could even wake up in a new Universe? Can they survive inside the blueberry hole? Is there a way to escape from it? Is the blueberry hole less dangerous than an ordinary black hole? Can Blueberryer rescue his Blueberryess without his Golden bike?

A detail from The Adventure in the Blueberry Hole

Before June 15, 2011 I had never heard about Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington or Kati Horna. It just so happened that I had been reading about Leonora Carrington in Time magazine (June 13, 2011) in the Milestones section. She had passed away at the age of 94. Not that I knew Leonora Carrington very well. But because she was a partner to Max Ernst and I am a big fan of his art it made me curious about hers. I decided to begin a search for this female surrealist painter, sculptor and writer; very much unknown to me. First I went through all my books about surrealism, about modern art history. I found nothing. I searched in the books that I posses about Max Ernst, nothing either. The next step was getting online of course.  I wanted to discover more about her and her art work. Most of the posts I could find online mentioned her death. Independent, Guardian, Telegraph all the papers were telling the story about Britain's lost and unknown great surrealist painter. “English surrealist painter and sculptor regarded as a national treasure in Mexico” (from The Guardian). Within her own family, Leonora Carrington was rarely mentioned, the rebel who had run off to be an artist’s model. But when Joanna Moorhead tracked down her long-lost cousin in Mexico, her eyes were opened to the extraordinary story of the last surviving member of the great Surrealists (from the Daily Telegraph). And so on and so on.

I went to Amazon and did a search for surreal female artists. I ordered three books which were available about female surreal artists. One is an album including paintings of most surreal female artists. The other two are wonderfully written and illustrated books. One is a biography about Remedios Varo (maybe more about her artistic achievement) written by Janet A. Kaplan. The last one is about the friendship and artistic creation of three surreal artists from European backgrounds who all lived and worked in Mexico. I discovered that Leonora Carrington had two very good friends in Remedios Varo and Kati Horna. Remedios Varo was a surreal artist and writer like Leonora Carrington herself. Kati Horna was an exceptionally brilliant photographer.  Kati Horna as well as Remedios Varo were/are incredibly original and talented artists. They are as great as Max Ernst, Man Ray, Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, Meret Oppenheim or Andre Masson, Paul Klee or Rene Magritte (who by the way wasn’t really a good painter – he was a great illustrator). They are absolutely better than Frida Kahlo (from my point of view).

From the great trio: Carrington, Horna and Varo; works of Remedios Varo and Kati Horna speek/ convince me most.

Kati Horna, Stairway to the Cathedral, photo-montage; Spain 1937

Remedios Varo, Harmony, 1956, oil on masonite.

Remedios Varo, Phenomenon of Weightlessnes, 1963; oil on canvas

The book about Remedios Varo included almost all her work. I fell in love immediately with her paintings. They are amazingly mysterious, scientifically imaginary, mathematically sophisticated and aesthetically absolutely beautiful.
You can probably imagine my feeling of embarrassment, surprise and disbelief that not even in one of the thousands books about art that I own could I find even one mention of her. After seeing her incredibly original art I felt kind of stupid and ashamed that I didn’t know Remedios Varo before. Expect lots of posts about her in the near future from me……..maybe even tomorrow!

This is the first painting from the surreal/fantastic series 'The Blueberry Lovers'. We have a boy called Blueberryer and a girl called Blueberryess. They are very much in love. But Blueberry Land is full of sophisticated robots, dangerous insects, unforeseen and unpredictable phenomena. Blueberry Land is also a land of mad scientists with their insane but at the same time brilliant inventions. The Quantum Blueberry Land.

This is the beginning of their story:

There is a golden night in Blueberry Land. The Blueberryer is cycling on his golden bike. He is in a hurry; he is worried about his Blueberryess. She is hidden in a golden cage. She was hidden there by a vicious Spider-witch. The witch wants to suck the delicious blueberry sweet-scented juicy life from the Blueberryess. Can the Blueberry Biker arrive in time to rescue his lover? Can they live together happily ever after in Blueberry Land?

Own technique on canvas, 40 cm x 40 cm; 2011 (sold)

Detail - Blueberry Biker

Detail - the spider's golden cage

Design Sponge - biz ladies how to avoid burnout
Interesting article aimed at 'Creative Entrepreneurs' about avoiding burn out


Smashing Magazine - Common client difficulties or turning all clients into dream clients
 Aimed at web designers, but the problems are the same for most commission work

ArtOrder - Marketing yourself (3 part series)
Some ideas on marketing - mainly for fantasy/ sci fi artists and some of the articles are geared towards conventions/ fairs (in person marketing)


Lifehack - 20 quick tips for better time management
Short, succinct tips for time management. You may have heard them before, but always good to reassess when things aren't working.

Maybe I should not post to this blog my own work, and I should not write about it either.
But in this case I can’t resist it. I think this painting has something fantastic, something enigmatic and mysterious.
After a few years spent reading and watching and doing research about fantastic and fantasy art and all the genres in between I am coming more and more to understand and recognise all the boundaries and confusions between and about fantasy art and the fantastic elements in art. In his famous book "Au coeur du fantastique" Roger Caillos said that fantasy is secret and mysterious . I am not sure he was right about that. There are lots of paintings in the fantasy art genre which are full of fantastic elements and full of weird and crazy imaginary creatures with absolutely no mysterious or secret ambience what so ever. It could be just the problem of the onomastics or the semantic. I don’t know since I can’t ask Caillos any more precisely what he meant when he used mystery and secret as synonyms for fantasy.
Back to my painting “The Blueberry Fantasy”; which I categorised as a mysterious painting and I am not only the one. All the people who have seen it found The Blueberry Fantasy a very surrealistic and secret work. Every time someone looks at it they find new mysterious creatures, shapes and shadows. And people love it. As proud as I am (read it as sarcasm) I present my mysterious paintings amongst all the other great works by famous painters.
Voila!

Blueberry Fantasy - acrylics on canvas, 90cmx90cm

I read a short snippet the today on a game development blog, and the long and short of it was that they believed hiring 2D artists was difficult. I read this once. Then reread it. I read some of the comments. There were comments about freebie artists and people that worked for royalties, so I've got a feeling that this blog was by either amateurs or people with naive view points on the worth of an artist. Of course I could be completely wrong and they had just dealt with a few difficult artists. Shock, horror! Me suggesting artists can be fickle!? But it's true, we're human - some are better than others with dealing with the business sides of the art world. You get fantastic artists who work to deadline with contracts, email on time, are always professional ... and then you have others who are not so great, or even great 80% of the time.

I read this, and I thought to myself why would they be having such a difficult time? So from an artist's point of view, here's a few things I look for when considering a commission:

• Simple courtesies such as addressing the email to me, the artist. If I get an email with just 'Hi' or 'to the artist', my first question is whether this person is trolling for quotes and is doing a copy and paste. I always like to give the benefit of the doubt - maybe they are intimidated, maybe they want to appear formal, I don't know... I just prefer requests to come with simple politeness :)
• Tell me who you are. If you are doing work for an online site and it's up, tell me about it - give me a link - I will go and look
• Be specific as to what you want. Have a clear list of the kind of work you want, what rights you are expecting, sizes, deadlines, styles and budget. Think of it like buying a house or a car. If you came up to me and said, "I want to buy a house, what's it going to cost?"... and that's all you said, I couldn't give you an accurate cost. I'd say something like "Prices start from X, and go up to Y. What's your budget or what do you have in mind?"
  
  I'm not trying to be difficult, I'm trying to work out whether I can do you a deal, whether I can fit you in, whether I've got what you need. If you can't tell me what you want, there's probably going to be a lot of vague figures, or larger figures so the client doesn't try to use my quote for a one bedroom flat next to a railway line for an 8 bedroom mansion.
• If you have a deadline - say it up front. Many artists have secondary jobs/ commitments. It's like putting a rush job on something that's already been scheduled. An artist may have to delay someone else's work, forgo something in their social life or work insane hours to get stuff done.
• Consider the prices of things on the artist's website. Look at similar artists and their prices. If they say their going rate is X and you ask for a discount, expect the artist to ignore you or reply with a 'thanks, but no thanks'. Remember, for many artists, commissions are their bread and butter. If someone said to you 'I know you earn X an hour, but I expect you to work for me for free or %50 off' what would you say?
• Size doesn't always matter. 50 artworks at 200 x 200 pixes is just as much effort, if not more than a single painting which is 1000 pixels by 800 pixels. Think of it like cupcakes. 50 cupcakes as compared to 1 cake - both take effort, both have different challenges. And painting individual pieces means you quite often have to work at 2-3 times the intended size.
• Consider the artwork in the artist's gallery. If you want a Michael Whelan painting, and they draw like Picasso, chances are both the artist and the commissioner will walk away with something they don't like
• Expect to sign a contract. Even for small pieces an artist will probably write something up which tells both parties what the expectations are.
• Graphics are great ways to communicate. Talking in pictures often makes working out quotes that much easier. However that being said, understand that pictures have usage rights too and an artist won't be allowed to copy something exactly if the copyright belongs to someone else.

I'm sure there is more that I can add, but that looks like enough of a start. Anyone got other things to add?