The Journal of Mythic Arts: Other Arts

The Heart's Desire: Jeanie Tomanek

Some people find their creative passion early in life, while for others it comes slowly, revealing itself only over time as their lives unfold. In our youth–obsessed culture, it can be disquieting for those whose Muse requires maturity — and yet sometimes an artist's vision is so remarkable and unique that it seems to need years to germinate slowly, fully, preparing itself deep in the psyche . . .and then suddenly blossoming with astounding power.

Coming to ones artistic vocation later in life is more common than many people realize, and can enrich ones work with qualities impossible to achieve at any younger an age. The great Japanese artist Hokusai once commented that it was only with age that he really understood how to draw. "By the age of fifty I had published numberless drawings," he said, "but I am displeased with all I have produced before the age of seventy. It is at seventy–three that I have begun to understand the form and the true nature of birds, of fishes, of plants and so forth. Consequently, by the time I get to eighty, I shall have made much progress; at ninety, I shall get to the essence of things; at a hundred, I shall certainly come to a superior, indefinable position; and at the age of a hundred and ten, every point, every line, shall be alive. And I leave it to those who shall live as I have myself, to see if I have not kept my word." ... More>>>

Baba Yaga in Russian Film by James Graham

In the 1960s, my father made it his mission to expose my brother and me to underground theater and cinema. On his day with us, usually Saturdays after catechism class, he would take us to Greenwich Village to watch arcane, experimental "children's" theater he had aggressively sought out from bulletin boards and small ads in the East Village Other. He loved live underground theater, or the romantic notion of it, and was using us to experience it vicariously. It was obvious to us that these "children's" productions were watered–down social action plays performed as fables to pay the rent on the black box. Like most nerdy young lefties who came to the Village to learn how to be cool, my parents suddenly found themselves with kids and no longer participated in as much theater and art as they had planned. Groups like Theater for the New City, the Living Theater, and the Bread and Puppet group adapted their own agitprop plays into matinee–ready fairy tales for hip dads and their kids. Often the groups used stories with clear enough subtext that they needed no translation. I remember sitting through countless productions of Through the Looking Glass, the drug and sexual references broader and broader with each performance...more>>>

Tibetan A Ice Lha mo: The World Beneath the Tent by Jeanette Snyder

I sat in Glenary's Tea Room, dawn just breaking, wolfing down my substantial English breakfast in preparation for the day long event to come. Outside the window the trickle of Tibetans dressed in their best, carrying aluminum teapots filled with chang (beer), packets of snacks and lunch, cushions, umbrellas, babies on their back, toddlers in hand, and the occasional little dog tucked into the chest fold of a robe, had increased to a steady flow moving up along the high street beneath my window. I gulped down the last of my tea and grabbed my camera and tape recorder, eager to join the excited throng headed in the direction of the Darjeeling Tibetan School grounds.

The Himalayan Range was bright in the distance and the day promised to be fair. It was spring 1964 in Darjeeling, India, and I was on my way to experience my first live performance of A lce Lha mo or lha mo. The name lha mo is most commonly explained by Tibetans to have originated from the portrayal by actors of the many female roles of goddesses or "lhamo" that are found in the plays. A lce means "elder sister." ... More>>>

Angels & Nightmares: Clive Hicks-Jenkins

"My work lies within a British tradition of landscape and abstraction," Clive writes, "re–interpreting concerns with place, form and history. My paintings, like my work as a stage designer and director, reflect a fascination with concealment, time and transformation. I draw inspiration particularly from the landscapes of Wales and the South West. Picasso once said of painting, that it is 'a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors, as well as our desires'. It's as good a description of painting as any I know, and it expresses succinctly my own practice." ... More>>>

Magic x 4: Kelly Louise Judd, Lisa Linnéa, Julia Jeffrey, Natalia Pierandrei

      

      

Magic x 4 features four works each by four artists from four countries: Kelly Louise Judd (USA), Lisa Linnéa (Sweden), Julia Jeffrey (Scotland) and Natalia Pierandrei (Italy). . . More>>>

Born Magazine: Multi-Media Storytelling on the Web by Midori Snyder

I have been thinking a great deal these days about storytelling — both traditional settings of performer and audience, and new experimental forms of contemporary interactive media. We once sat, eyes rapt, listening to a performer, her recitation punctuated by the nonverbal text of her body, her facial expressions, and her hands moving rapidly through a vocabulary of signifying gestures. An ephemeral form of interactive theater, the story lasted only as long as the performance, each story recitation unique to the moment of its telling. Thus, in addition to oral recitation, storytellers have relied on the visual arts as well to produce a more durable method of sharing stories: the spectacle of a prehistoric hunt scratched in ochre and red lines across a rock face at Chauvet-Pont-Arc; a momentous battle stitched into the Bayeux Tapestry by women, sitting in their sewing rooms, imagining the clash of weapons; the surreal bird–headed men and bat–winged women etched by Max Ernst in his 1939 illustrated tale of exorcism, Un Semaine de Boite (A Week of Kindness). Even today, writing stories, we may consider the text itself at times a form of visual art. Words appear mechanical in a typeset manuscript, dramatic in the flowing calligraphy of a scroll, lassoed in iconic speech bubbles of a graphic novel or passionately scribbled in private notebooks.... More>>>

Inner Seasons: Virginia Lee

    

Virginia Lee is an young English artist whose work is rich with symbolism drawn from myth, folklore and fairy tales, exploring the ways these symbols can be used to express themes of transformation. Her paintings and drawings of animal–women, tree–women, and dream–haunted young girls depict the deep connections between women's lives and nature's cycles. Such visions come from the wilderness — the primeval forest in mythic quests; the endangered forests of our modern world; and the dark forests of the psyche, representing an inward journey through deep realms of the soul... More>>>

Myth & Metaphor: Jacqueline Morreau

      

Artists throughout the centuries have expressed themselves in the metaphoric language of myth, from Botticelli's “The Birth of Venus” to Picasso's Minotaur drawings and paintings. Historically, these images presented the figures of myth from a distinctly masculine point of view — but with the advent of feminist art in the 1970s and 1980s, women artists began to challenge the gender assumptions inherent in traditional readings and portrayals of the tales. They re–assessed the images of women drawn from classical myths, biblical tales, folk tales, and other ancient, familiar stories, and reworked this imagery in modern, unfamiliar, thought–provoking ways.

Foremost among the artists working with myth today is the painter and printmaker Jacqueline Morreau, who uses the symbols of myth to explore the personal and political truths of women's lives.... More>>>

Miracles in the Backlands: Aspects of Africa in Brazilian Ex-Voto Sculpture by Beate Echos

   

The vast sertão, or interior, of northeastern Brazil, is the country's least industrialized and most mysterious region. For centuries, its original indigenous population has been blended with both Europeans and descendants of African slaves. In this arid area marked by persistent poverty, religious beliefs serve to provide a refuge from hardship and to cope with adversity, be it death, disease, accidents, violence, or natural disasters. Religious cults are still of a home–made variety here. They combine elements of Catholicism with indigenous and African belief systems...  More>>>

Winter Fool, Summer Queen: Shakespeare's Folklore and the English Holiday Cycle by Kristen McDermott

...Many fantasy writers have tried to imagine how Will Shakespeare got his gift for turning mere stories into works of wonder. Neil Gaiman, in his wonderful Sandman series, has young Will Shakespeare commissioned by Morpheus, the King of Dreams, to write A Midsummer Night's Dream to be presented to Oberon, the Faery King, and his court. Morpheus confers on Will the power to bring dreams to life, on the condition that he write one more faery play (which turns out to be The Tempest) at his career's end. Sara Hoyt, in Ill Met By Moonlight, envisions a beautiful faery shape-shifter named Quicksilver, residing in the forest of Arden (just outside Stratford), as Shakespeare's male and female muse and guide to the realm of the Otherworld.

In truth, Shakespeare has almost become part of the folklore of the English-speaking world himself—his mysterious origins and awe-inspiring poetic gifts lead many to see him as a semi-divine figure; little wonder that we fantasize about where such genius came from... More>>>

Fairy Tale Theatre in Portugal: The Art of Transformation by Howard Gayton

 

In the autumn of 2006, I was asked to direct a group of drama students from the ESMAE theatre school in Porto, Portugal, in their third year theatre production. It was to be performed for children from six to eleven years old, and was to be a 'devised' show (i.e., a show whose text and stage movements were to be created by myself and the students). I decided to base the play on a Portuguese fairy tale... More>>>

From Fairy Tales to Fantasia: Denmark's Kay Nielsen

The period in art history now referred to as the Golden Age of Book Illustration occurred in London at the end of the nineteenth century and in the dawning years of the twentieth century — growing out of the reassessment of Book Arts fostered by the Pre–Raphaelites and the Arts–&–Crafts movement, and aided by advances in printing techniques that made the publication of sumptuously illustrated volumes suddenly economically feasible. As a result, a number of the greatest book illustrators the world has ever known were clustered in London during those years: Walter Crane, Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Charles and William Heath Robinson, Charles Ricketts, Lawrence Housman, Henry Ford, Jean de Bosschère, and many others — including a young Dane named Kay (pronounced "Kigh") Nielsen, who turned up in the city in 1911 at the tender age of twenty–five with a series of black–and–white drawings inspired by Beardsley under his arm.... More>>>

Old Wives Tale: Women Fairy Tale Artist, Old & New

   

"There exists a European convention of an archetypal female storyteller, 'Mother Goose' in English, 'Ma Mere l'Oie' in French, an old woman sitting by thefireside . . . . Obviously, it was Mother Goose who invented all the 'old wives' tales,' even if old wives of any sex can participate in this endless recycling process, when anyone can pick up a tale and make it over. Old wives' tales — that is, worthless stories, untruths, trivial gossip, a derisive label that allots the art of storytelling to women at the exact same time that it takes all value from it." -- Angela Carter

This article looks at work by 16 women fairy tale artists from the 19th to 21st centuries, accompanied by an essay by Terri Windling discussing the subject of women and fairy tales. More>>>

A Chorus of Clowns: The Roots of Masked Comic Theater by Midori Snyder

    

In the middle of winter, when it is so gray I can't take it any more, I rent as many Marx Brothers movies as I can find. There is something about the zany interaction of these "clowns" creating havoc in a department store, a racetrack, or the stateroom of an ocean liner that brightens the dullness of the day. Then there is that crackling, fast dialogue, most of it famously improvised; and the elaborate musical numbers, ridiculous dances, and absurd moments of slapstick. Perhaps because I know they are four brothers, I sense a kinship in their characters. Although each one of them wears a different costume and "mask," there is a synchronicity in their performance — for while each one constructs his own comedic business, they do not act alone, but form a madcap chorus of clowns. Watching them, I sense much older traditions layered beneath the surface of their film performances. It is easy to imagine Groucho with satyr's hooves or Harpo in the round wide–mouth mask of an ancient Fool. Inspired by the antics of the Marx Brothers, I decided to review the roots of clowning in the early Southern European history of theater clowns — not the circus clowns — but those masked characters who rose out of early pagan cults and then developed into secular, irreverent tricksters and mirrors of human behavior.... More>>>

Marionettes and Clowns

Chandra Cerchione–Peltier is an American mixed media figurative artist, with a particular interest in doll art and marionettes. Her enchanting work is deeply inspired by her study of myth, folklore, and fairy tales, and by her love for fantastic literature from William Morris to Charles de Lint... More>>>

Traveling the Wilds

             

"Faery Nest," the magical little drawing above, comes from Traveling the Wilds, a selection of new sketches Oliver Hunter, a young artist from Australia. It's part of JoMA's new "sketchbook series" (following "Fairy Sketchbooks" by Alan Lee, Iain McCaig, Charles Vess, & Terri Windling). Look for more sketchbooks in the months ahead....