Endicott Redux

Young Artists Spotlight: Chantal Bennett

   

I love discovering the work of emerging artists -- the young men and women who represent the future of the mythic arts field. Today our spotlight is on Chantal Bennett, a Canadian illustrator based in Brooklyn, New York.

"I am currently finishing up my studies in illustration at Parsons New School of Design in New York City," she says, "and most of the recent work I've been doing has been heavily influenced by Celtic mythology and folklore." She also loves Art Nouveau, and illustrative art from the Victorian age.

Visit Bennett's website and Live Journal sketch blog to see more of her enchanting art.

   

Young Artists Spotlight: Nadia Turner

     

The charming paintings above are by Nadia Turner, a freelance illustrator out of Melbourne, Australia. Her inspiration, she says, comes from many sources: the art of the Surrealists and the Pre-Raphaelites, traditional folk art, children's book illustration, and music -- especially the Celtic harp and all the mythology and folklore associated with it.

Visit her website to see more of her work. (With thanks to Desiree Isphording for the link.)

Into the Woods: Rima Staines Fantastic Animation

As soon as I finished posting this to my own blog, I figured it was one of those times when I should break my own rule about not double posting. The work is just too amazing not to share all around.

Artist Rima Staines has entered into the creative world of stop motion animation (inspired by the work of Eastern European masters Jan Svankmajer and Yuri Norstein) and produced a gorgeous, gorgeous little music video for singer Polly Paulusma -- whose song "The Woods" is a kind of loose version of Hansel and Gretel.  Rima's beautiful art and Paulusma's lovely voice (very Nora Jones-ish) have combined to create a gentle, but haunting tale of children lost in the woods.

Of the song Rima writes: "Polly's lyrics inspired the forest-as-witness-to-a-dark-happening story ... which calls to mind a rather less than sugary Hansel & Gretel tale and conjures imagined fears of the archetypal forest as well as a real horror of a terrifying bogeyman, in more tangible guises. It speaks too of the turning of the year ... I am pleased to say that it was received with smiles and kind words and even got played on MTV in Italy! And I must add that I would never have made it to the end if it weren't for the patience and brain of my kind brother."

Do stop by Rimas' website, The Hermitage, to view more of her art, and read more about the process of making this wonderful little film on her blog, Into the Hermitage.

Metamorphosis #9: Julianna Swaney

Here's yet another young artist creating lovely work on the theme of transformation and metamorphosis: printmaker Julianna Swaney. Swaney graduated with a BFA from Maine College of Art in 2005. She currently lives and works in Michigan.

Interviewed in the Winter 2006 issue of What You Make It, Swaney was asked how she developed her personal style. "I aways admired printmakers who use intricate or repetitive details," she answered. "Artists such as Kiki Smith and Albrecht Durer inspired me to spend hours over a copper intaglio plate drawing feathers and fur. You can get incredibly detailed in intaglio. After I learned that technique I wanted my drawings to look as detailed as an intaglio print. It's sort of strange because I'm actually not a very patient person, but I love drawing detail....

"I think that a few of the most obvious [of my influences] are my interests in lace and Victorian hair. The Victorians created whole pictures out of human hair, which I think is both fascinating and macabre. I like to wonder about what it would look like if people's hair just grew that way, into intricate flowers and branches where birds could just land."

Please visit Swaney's Oh My Cavalier! website and her MySpace page to see more of her enchanting work. (With thanks to artist Rachael DiRenna for the links.)

Metamorphosis #8: Miniature Mouse

   

There seem to be quite a number of young artists doing wonderful work these days, and thanks to the Internet it's become easier to find out about them. One of my favorites is illustrator and photographer Fumi Minnie Nakamura, who exhibits her art on the web under the name Miniature Mouse.

Nakamura's works on paper are whimsical and magical, rendered with delicacy and technical panache. Like Fay Ku, she draws on the art traditions of both East and West, creating distinctive imagery that brings to mind arts as diverse as Japanese anime, the illustrations of Trina Schart Hyman and Yvonne Gilbert, the "Lowbrow" painting movement championed by Juxtapoz Magazine, and the magical realist fiction of Haruki Murakami. 

Born in 1984, Nakamura spent half of her childhood in Shimizu, Japan, and the other half in the Bay Area of northern California. She attended the California College of Arts and Crafts, the San Francisco Art Institute, and San Jose State University, where she studied studio arts, printmaking, and illustration. She has exhibited her work in California, New York, Ohio, and Sidney, Australia.

I highly recommend a visit to the recently-revised Miniature Mouse website -- where you can view a wider range of drawings and photographs, and also purchase prints and original works. Information about upcoming shows can be found on her MySpace page, LiveJournal, and Virb.

 

And speaking of talented young artists, don't miss Magic x 4, the new exhibition in the Endicott Gallery.

Young Artists Spotlight: Desirée Isphording

As a follow-up to yesterday's Sunday Poem inspired by Deer Woman legends, here are two fabulous Deer Woman paintings by Desirée Isphording, a talented young artist from Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Desirée describes DeerWoman (the painting to the right) as a figure "caught between two forms: that of a graceful doe and that of a girl. She is a shapeshifter, a creature who lingers at the edges of the Veil. She does not completely belong to either to the realm of Faery or of mortals. She wears both the finery of human aristocracy as well as a Jack-in-the-Pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum) in her hair. A tapestry, woven with human hands, bars her from the forest, the haunt of her faery kin, yet it still permits her a painful last glance at a path to the Otherworld. That same tapestry may also hold a clue - hunters with their dogs and spears are searching the forest for game. The style of this piece was largely inspired by Renaissance portraiture, and the tapestry is in many ways a homage to the Unicorn Tapestries." (Read more about the painting here.)

About the second painting, The White Doe of Nara, she says: "Where DeerWoman is tragic, perhaps a victim or perhaps a reluctant but mythically necessary sacrifice, the White Doe is a figure with power. While destiny is something DeerWoman succumbs to, the White Doe has a direct hand in weaving it. DeerWoman avoids the viewer's gaze, the White Doe commands it. I feel that the compositional appearance of the landscapes in both images is significant also; DeerWoman is poised at a threshold between worlds, but the White Doe is the threshold, a manifestation of it as well as a gatekeeper of sorts. Unlike the melancholy DeerWoman, the White Doe sprouts antler spikes - she has a means of defense (or offense!). And, of course, there is the rather obvious distinction in cultural context. A Western European influence is prevalent in DeerWoman, but there is a pan-Asian inspiration for this piece. " (Read more about the painting here.)

Comparing mythic art to fantasy art, she writes: "Mythic art...does not seek to exist in its own isolated bubble, but to tie into our world both spatially and temporally. Mythic art does not seek to temporarily sever us from our daily lives, but encourages us to delve deeper into the fabric of the world we actually inhabit. Fantasy whisks us away, while mythic art seeks instead to take us on a journey, which may be either fairly direct or labyrinthine, that ultimately leads back to the origin -- the world we encounter everyday. Mythic art brings us full circle." (Read the full post,"Ruminations on Mythic Art," here.)

To see more of Desirée's distinctive work, visit the Desirée's Musings and sphinxmuse websites -- which not only contain some lovely art (drawings, paintings, and jewelry), but also poetry and prose on the myths, references, and ideas behind her work. You'll also find two of her pieces in the Autumn 2006 issue of Goblin Fruit.

Young Artists Spotlight: Kelly Louise Judd

Many thanks to Endicott contributor Ari Berk for pointing the way to Swan Bones Theatre, a website featuring the fantastical, gorgeously macabre art of Kelly Louise Judd. Judd creates paintings, dolls, and jewelry inspired by "Victorian illustration, fairy tales, abnormal psychology, and Northern Renaissance art," among other things. (Her work also reminds me of the haunting paintings of the Spanish/Mexican surrealist painter Remedios Varo.) Judd lives in Kansas City, where she received her B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2002. In addition to the Swan Bones Theatre website (where it's worth spending some time perusing the various galleries), you'll also find new works and works-in-progress on Judd's live journal.