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Kubin was born in 1867 in Bohemia in the area that is now part of the Czech Republic. He had a difficult childhood as his mother died when he was ten years old and his father was a cruel man who saw his son as good-for-nothing. He became distant from his family and began play out fantasies of sadism and catastrophes, born out of his hate towards his father and all other men. When he was eleven and a half, he was seduced by an older pregnant woman that he himself admitted “must have cast its shadow on [his] early manhood”. He was not successful at school and went to work for his uncle by marriage who was a photographer in Carinthia. While he did not learn much in the way of an apprentice from his uncle he did see many photographs of things he had never seen that left an impression on him. When he was nineteen he attempted suicide at his mother’s grave after a nervous breakdown, but his rusty pistol failed to fire. Fired by his uncle, he attempted to join the army as a last resort, but another mental breakdown led to four months in an army hospital followed by Kubin returning to his family home.

In 1898 on the advice of a family friend, Kubin’s father finally allowed him to study art in Munich where he first studied under Ludwig Schmidt-Reutte in private drawing classes for a year. He also attended some of Nikolaus Gysis’s classes at the academy, but hated the traditional techniques of drawing still lives and nudes. Instead, he found inspiration in the work of philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who enforced his bleak worldview. He discovered the work of artists that he liked and began to collect it, Klinger, Goya, de Groux, Rops, Munch, Ensor, Redon and other symbolists (who believed in the rejection of the dominant school of naturalism and that art should “clothe ideas in a perceptible form”. Klinger and Goya’s influence can easily be seen in the works of his early period in his heavy use of aquatint and their grotesque and fantastical dreamlike content (El sueño de la razón produce monstrous after all). He would become involved in the Sturmfackel circle of artists (who belonged to a number of different schools) that also included Ernst Stern, Alexander Salzmann, Albert Weisgerber, Gino Finetti, and Rudolf Levy. Through contacts in the group, he was able to organize his first gallery showing at the Galerie Paul Cassirer in Berlin in winter 1901-02, but the content of his paintings shocked the press and caused outrage. Shortly after this, he met Hans von Weber, who as a patron, was crucial during Kubin’s early period. Only a few weeks after meeting one another, he was planning to publish a selection of Kubin’s prints. The portfolio was well-received and gained him recognition in wider circles. Two additional portfolios were planned but never materialised, as it is believed the pair felt the subject matter (one of erotic prints, the other parodying church and state) would be too controversial.

In 1902-03, Kubin’s work became tamer when he met his young girlfriend Emmy Bayer in Scharding and spent many happy months with her. The tone of his work became less disturbing, which he himself in his autobiography claims was due to having a regular sex life for the first time. Bayer would die though in December of 1903 and shortly afterwards he would meet the woman who would be his wife for a life time, Hedwig Grundler, the sister of Karl Wolfskehl who had been widowed at a young age. It was not a marriage without problems though, as Hedwig was frequently ill and became addicted to morphine, spending frequent spells in sanatoriums from 1904 until 1919. The substantial dowry they received was depleted by her addiction and due to her absence Kubin once again was alone without a sex life. In the winter of 1904 he returned to the muted style of his earlier work and produced some of his famous works such as Hunengrab and Sterbende Stadt.

In March 1905, he travelled to Vienna where he learned from Koloman Moser the technique of adding paste to watercolours which would allow him to create unique colour effects and he would experiment with this technique for two years, before deciding to return to tempera. His tempera works would show the influence of Redon, but also the Barbizon school, such as Corot, Diaz, Daubigny and Rousseau. Moving from Munich to Zwickledt in Austria in 1906, he began working on his famous underwater landscapes. Once again this new direction did not stick though, and in the following year he became interested in the work of the successors of Gaugain, the French Nabis. During this time he presented a new collection of thirty-two of his new tempera works at the Galerie Thannhauser in Munich. As the pieces were so different to his earlier work, the audience was confused and as a result his artwork sales dropped to virtually zero.

1907 would see another change in his style as he travelled to Bosnia and Dalmatia where he met his friend Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando. It was during this journey that he began to draw the pen-and-ink sketches that would define the style of his late period. Later in the year, his father died nearby Schalding, which lead to a creative crisis as Kubin found it difficult to draw and produced only a few drawings in 1908. In the autumn, after returning from a trip to northern Italy, he found that he could not draw anything; he was “not capable of putting down coherent, intelligible lines.” He felt the need to work so strongly that he began to write and found that what he was writing came to him so intensely that he had to work day and night for twelve weeks until the book was completed. He spent the next four weeks illustrating the novel, which became his fantastic novel. Die Andere Seite (The Other Side).

Other Posts by Paul Charles Smith on Alfred Kubin:

Themes in the Early Work of Kubin

The Other Side

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“Mutation” indeed gets at the heart of Potter’s recurring themes; the bold layering and blending of disparate elements that lend his work to narrative is suggestive of constant transition in some form or another, often with either overtly or subtly macabre sensibilities.  This sense of the macabre is often grounded in bodily concerns that merge the monstrous with the sensual, suggesting that the two are perhaps more closely related than we’d like to acknowledge.  In addition to these ideas being presented in his numerous illustrations for the works of speculative fiction authors, he has also released collections of his own work that explore these topics somewhat more freely, in the form of Neurotica (featuring modeling from weird author Poppy Z. Brite) and Horripilations. We talked to Potter to get more of the story behind his work.

“The Taborin Scale” by J.K. Potter

Weird Fiction Review: Can you tell us a little bit about your process? Do you begin with a particular goal in mind for the image you want to arrive at, or do you perhaps have a more “play it by ear” approach?

J.K. Potter: Because I use photography and because I am dependent on models my first goal in illustrating a book is finding scenes that I can actually pull off considering the limitations of my techniques. I ask myself, what do I see in this story that I can recreate using my own source material, my surroundings, models, props, etc. I am not quite as versatile as illustrators who paint and draw. I recently had a falling out with a publisher who tried to tell me exactly what scenes in a book to illustrate. I’m more flexible on covers but I have to be free to pick my own interiors. That’s just how I’ve always worked from day one. Interestingly, I had someone recently ask me where I get my source images. They were surprised to find out I take my own pictures. They thought I was buying them from some secret Fantasy-Horror stock photo archive!

WFR: What do you feel is the role of art when it comes to interacting with the story in question?

JKP: Illustrating a book immediately puts me in a coffin with the author’s name on it. This isn’t as bad as it sounds. As an illustrator I try to inhabit the author’s fictional world. All images are subservient to the writing. They wouldn’t exist without the author so they are not personal works but collaborative ones. The authors I illustrate often push me into unique worlds that I never would have found on my own. This sometimes ends up affecting my personal work in positive ways. I admit that sometime I’ve missed my cues and produced inaccurate illustrations, but one can’t always be perfect.

“Ghosts of the Hotel Grim #2” by J.K. Potter

WFR: Do your methods differ when you’re working on your own personal projects versus working on images for a book?

JKP: There are hundreds of personal works on my website jkpotter.com. They are different from my illustrations in many ways. First, many are location driven. I am obsessed with haunted places. Ghosts are my specialty. The weird crumbling factories and abandoned places I photograph inspire me to create new ghostly and monstrous things much in the same way it does working with an author . A good example is my Ghosts of the Hotel Grim project. The whole series grew out of my experiences in an actual place in Texas whose real name is the Hotel Grim. My personal works are more rooted in reality than my illustrations. I take a lot of straight photos and they are scattered throughout my personal projects. These confuse some of my old-school fans who say to me, “Hey that’s just a picture of a girl in a swamp. Why doesn’t she have a shark-mouth or something!?” They expect more flashy effects but I like taking straight-up photos and will continue to do so.

WFR: How did you get started in art?

JKP: I started in grade school drawing pictures of certain teachers I didn’t like with nails and hatchets in their heads. I learned that the other kids would give me their lunch money for these kind of drawings. My first published work was in a 1975 issue of Nils Hardin’s pulpzine Xenophile. It was an intricate ink drawing on the cover of the First World Fantasy Convention commemorative issue. It makes me sad when other people try to take credit for what Nils Hardin did for me. Nils really discovered me and launched my career. He once generously sent me an original piece of art by Clark Ashton Smith. I still have it. Don Grant published my first illustrated book Tales Of The Werewolf Clan way back in 1979. Don gave me a second big boost.

“Ghosts of the Hotel Grim #1” by J.K. Potter

WFR: You’ve had quite a long and prolific career. How do you think your art has evolved over the course of your career?

JKP: About 1977, I started using photography because I was the world’s slowest artist. It would take me months to finish one piece. From 1977 to about 2005 I was a dedicated film-camera, darkroom, and airbrush guy. Strictly analog. I stubbornly stayed a film junkie well into the computer age and only switched to digital when the darkroom started destroying my health. In the days before Photoshop, I was really able to develop a name for myself, and I have built on that ever since. Happily, the skills and work-ethic I developed in my darkroom days have carried over extremely well into Photoshop. Things are definitely easier now, but it’s not quite as romantic to me as it was during the film era. For some reason, I liked doing things the hardest way possible. That’s what really made me. As my career has evolved, I’ve also broadened my horizons from strictly Horror to Fantasy, Science Fiction, Steam Punk, and mainstream illustration. I’ve had a few really great editors who refused to typecast me and who helped me to grow. I’ve been very, very lucky in that regard.

WFR: Who are some of your favorite weird fiction authors? Are there any authors who have specifically influenced your art?

JKP: Besides the authors I’ve been most associated with, most of the writers I’ve been influenced by can be found listed in H.P.Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” I also love authors like Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers, but I don’t want to leave out non-literary stuff like Al Feldstein in EC comics, Steve Ditko in early Marvel monster comics, Creepy and Eerie magazines… I could go on and on forever.

WFR: Who are some of your influences? Who are some of your favorite visual artists?

JKP: These days I’m into freight-train graffiti and tags, hobo art, art of the insane, old monster movies, Cramps-style rockabilly horror, pulp magazine covers, and vintage Halloween stuff. Really anything offbeat or oddball attracts me. Right now my favorite artist is a graffiti guy who just calls himself 27. You can see a few of his drawings in photographs for my Love Your Yard series.

WFR: What are you currently working on? What have you worked on or released recently?

JKP: I’ve been scanning a lot of my oldest works in preparation for resurrecting them on my website, making prints, and preparing a new art book. I’ve also been working on an illustrated essay called “Behind The Scenes: The Face That Must Die” to memorialize my first great model/collaborator Dead Joe. My latest profusely illustrated project is a small book by Tim Powers. It’s called Nobody’s Home and is published by Subterranean Press. Tim Powers has probably influenced me most out of all the authors I’ve worked with in recent years. I would also like to recommend Five Autobiographies and a Fiction by the late great Lucius Shepard. There are no interior illustrations, just a cover by me, but it is a truly mind-boggling anthology. If you are interested in weird fiction you should not miss it.

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WeirdFictionReview: Your art is very distinct and easy to identify. It’s an interesting combination that ranges from Gothic to surreal to fantastical. How do you tend to describe your style?

Santiago Caruso: Today, I would define myself as a Symbolist, who recreates the deformation of reality that the human being perceives — i.e. the phantom of conventional objects — to go deeper into them with a new kind of perception. I try to summon a poetic phantom that supplies a wider vision of the human, contemplating the beautiful, the frightening, the repressed or forgotten in the shadows, the impossible. With this concept of depiction, I try to utilize Gothic symbolism as a crystallized view of the world in many respects. I combine religion, politics, and commonplace things to reveal another vision of the world with regard to the unconscious, the damned ghosts we’ve buried, and many other aspects of history and philosophy.

WFR: How did you become an artist? What artists or artworks have influenced your work?

SC: From a very early age, I remember building houses, ships, and other stuff with boxes or chairs and playing in them with toys; inventing stories is something I’ve always done since then. Drawings and music were also present since the first days of my childhood. I copied comic strips such as Patoruzú, Condorito and Afanancio. I also made caricatures of people and by chance, I attended classes with a teacher who did comics when I was 14 years old. Music was always there, in addition, influencing my artwork.

Later, at 19, I made illustration my medium of expression. I started making children’s illustrations in books for school. Later, under the influence of William Blake and other Symbolists, such as Max Klinger, Alfred Kubin, and Odilon Redon, my style underwent a change in order to be the same tone of the themes I saw in their images. The questions of evil, sin, love, memory and beauty, are subjects that were inspiring to me, so the narrative path I took to illustrate weird fiction turned later from the anecdotic allegory into poetry in order to build a narrative and not just a moment in the story. I do oscillate between those languages, depending on the text and how I want to express the content. These days, I am writing and I believe those scripts can be songs. I don’t know, but maybe I will do something with music too.

WFR: You’ve done art for a number of weird fiction books like The King in the Golden Mask and Year’s Best Weird Fiction. Do you read weird fiction?

SC: Yes, I do. My artwork is closely related with fantastic literature of the XIX century and philosophy. I am between Romanticism and psychology, poetry and skepticism.

I am related to the word, or I should say, to language. I believe I construct my images as if I were writing them. The final view of it must communicate in one glance the general feeling and idea, but after that, you can read the image almost as a text, so it must be built with the same rules of grammar if you want to express yourself clearly.

WFR: Are there authors or poets have inspired you? Are there any particular books, literature, poems that have inspired your works?

SC: One of the special moments of change in my life was when I read the writings of William Blake and Charles Baudelaire. The latter is almost like a father to my style. I could say I am always returning to him as a prodigal son. I’ve also started reading Poe, Lovecraft, Meyrink, and many others but the particular view of Marcel Schwob is the perfect mirror I’ve found for my visual narrative. The French Decadent movement is the weird literature I love the most, specifically À rebours (Against Nature) by J. K. Huysmans.

As a project next year, I have the hard task of undertaking “Les chants de Maldoror”, but I will enjoy the challenge. The strange tone and eclectic mood of the writings of Pascal Quignard is another thing I find inspiring. I try to express this in the change from narrative to visual poetry I do these days. However, the tone of my images is also somewhat rooted in Eastern European taste. It’s quite a mysterious link since I didn’t see any of their products until some time after I changed the way I depict the world, transitioning from the grotesque to classic figuration between 2004 and 2005.

WFR: What sorts of media do you use? Can you tell us about your process of painting?

SC: I usually use ink and watercolors. The ink is applied over a plastered cardboard and is later scratched with a cutter to depict the lighting. There is no sketch, so I work slowly, using the shape of spots of ink from the base, to construct my figures in there, in the shadows.

Recently, to save time, I returned to tempera and acrylics images with a textural mood in a dark tone like my other scratched art. I want to paint again in oils, after almost ten years. I’ll see if I find the time for it.

WFR: In Argentina, are there other visual artists, poets, authors who are pursuing the same sort of art and style as you?

SC: Yes, while exploring art, I’ve found others like Guillermo Roux, Quique Alcatena, and Federico Parolo, who present a world of strangeness and symbolisms. If I go far enough in the past, I’ve also enjoyed the engravings of Víctor Delhez, a Belgian-born artist, raised in Argentina since his youth, who has illustrated Lord Dunsany, Charles Baudelaire, and Saint John’s Apocalypse. In writing, I’ll mention María Negroni and Ángel Olgoso, who give a poetic treatment of the fantastique. Lastly, I made some illustrations for a book of Olgoso, which is still looking for a publisher.

WFR: What do you consider as some of your best pieces?

SC: Time will tell, but I’ll mention Portrait of Crime, Wunderkammer, Lies Beneath, UNIVERSA MYSTERIUM. Anyway, the best painting is the one I haven’t done yet.

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In the words of the curators of the exhibit:

The title of this show harks back to a time when our taste for melodrama was at its peak. The Victorian ‘gothic fiction’ of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and Edgar Allen Poe reflected a public fascination with the tragic and frightening, which in its own way was an echo of their time. Concurrent with this was the romantic notion of beauty in pain and the tortured artist. The beautiful melancholy of the Pre-Raphaelite era combined love, death, and nature with stoic courage and an aesthetic grace. The eight artists in this show have a similar sensibility, delving into grave ideas, such as suffering, mortality, futility, and our path to self-destruction, while recognizing the resilience of the human spirit. We recognize the light by passing through the shadows. In some faiths there is no evil, just an absence of good, there is no dark, just an absence of light.

The curators see their featured contemporary artists as working within a spectrum of visual art including such darkly compelling artists as Bosch, Brugel, and Goya, and yet “they speak with individual and authentic voices, based in personal experience of their own time.” And so, “the grotesque is celebrated; our sympathies, darkest fears, and our ability to empathize with the most wretched are provoked.”

Below you can find a sampling of work from the artists who will be on display at the exhibit. Based on this array of work, we think it’s safe to say that this collection will be promising for fans of weird art, at the very least. For additional information, interested parties can view the Brumfield’s Gallery website.

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A selection of images from the publishers and others illustrating various aspects of the Southern Reach novels. You can find more information and images at the FSG page and at the very creepy Fourth Estate page for the book–where you can even sign up for an expedition.

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Greeter, 2002

With the onslaught of holiday madness, it is perhaps most appropriate to look at Nina Levy’s funny, disturbing and oh-so-true portraits of social identity. Levy’s sculptures are consistently playful and grotesque, the horror of everyday masks we wear to placate or nourish others laid bare. What I like is the absence of celebration or judgment in her work—there is a sense of the beautiful always on the edge of insanity. For instance, her piece Greeter (2002) features a 6’4 version of the artist herself, positioned at the entrance of her exhibit. The face and hairstyle is primarily feminine, yet the clothes and height suggest a kind of androgyny, placing the body in a liminal space.

Besides the greeter’s height, her grin is the only other exaggerated and most artificial aspect of the body.  Of course the stance and grins plays on social norm of the artist as object, always on display. However, the pose also comments on norms of “niceness”—how we (women especially) are always told to wear a smile. Stretched to take up half of her face, the greeter’s teeth are bared to suggest an aggressive or even predatory attitude. Meanwhile the woman’s distant, haunted eyes and her arms held behind her back create a paradox—she is both threatening and powerless. How many of us feel such a dichotomy in social situations where we are expected to be strong, happy, and pulled together when we feel none of things?

Toss, 2006

Toss (2006) creates the most immediate sense of the ridiculous as a giant baby’s head is being tossed between two trapeze parents. We are thrown into a Rabelaisian world of strange laughter, for the two parents seem barely strong enough to throw or catch the baby. Adding to the humor, or perhaps the horror, the viewer next notices that the parents have lost both of their heads. The baby looks mesmerized or possibly on the edge of being scared, as its gaze is focused downward (where maybe its own body lies). The chaos and wonder and danger of raising children is encapsulated in this one in-between moment, of not knowing whether the child will make it or not. But the sculpture holds more dangerous questions for the larger society, for how much are we gambling with our children’s minds—aka, their education? Have we blindly turned education into a performance, one we can’t even navigate anymore? Likewise, the work also begs us to wonder about how the younger generation might feel towards the older ones given the legacy of climate change and the deficit they will be left with.

Family Resemblance, 2006

Family Resemblance (2006) also playfully indicts a society that has become more kid oriented, rather than truly integrated. Parents of young children especially get caught up in the pressures of choosing the right schools and extracurricular activities while working full time, so often “losing their heads” in the process. The little boy focuses on the viewer with a troubled gaze while the parents look up in wonder. Levy related how her son started screaming after seeing the image of his parents looking like him. An uncanny moment, to see the familiar become so strange by becoming too alike.

Ticklish, 2008

Levy’s Ticklish (2008) might elicit laughter first on seeing a woman’s breasts replaced by a baby’s adorable, chubby legs. I would argue that the humor immediately gives way to horror since like breasts, the legs protrude out, yet their size is not a normal baby’s size but much larger. The oversized legs twist society’s misguided fascination with bigger sized breasts, always only in service of a sexual other. Levy’s work reminds us that breasts have another function—feeding a child—which receives much critique when performed in public. Levy’s arm position also suggests that more of the child might emerge or even that the child is trapped forever inside her. Her gaze looks downward as if breastfeeding; her expression unreadable. She shows neither joy nor fear but more calm interest, examining this new relationship with her body. The absence of sadness in the woman’s face could be questioning the the pervading cultural construct of how breasts should look (firm and perky), no matter what the circumstance. That rigid boundary is one the grotesque could forever play with, being at heart a boundary creature. Levy’s work employs the carnivalesque since her bodies are always in the process of becoming, of morphing into some other recognizable, yet unfamiliar form. These “fixed” transitions push viewers into an ambiguous space where a sculpture suddenly becomes their uncanny other, finally bringing hidden identities into the light.

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Grasses of Green Lemon Drops, 2012

Daphne Arthur’s Smoke Drawings takes us into an other-worldly landscape that is both recognizable and yet beautifully foreign. Many of the objects in her artwork border on appearing animated, thus creating a narrative of the fantastic. Take for instance Grasses of Green Lemon Drops, where the scene resides in between apocalyptic desolation and serene beauty. The tree in the foreground accompanied by those exotic blooms seem like a well-placed houseplant. Just behind it, however, we see another tree that has risen up through a wreckage of wood metal structures. Likewise, to the left, a vine with ominous tentacles encroaches on the wooden beams, some of which look to be is disrepair or decay. The covering above is both beautiful and haunting, with its blood tones, and even to the left, it looks to be more like a membrane with delicate veins running throughout.

Catching Butterflies, 2012

In Catching Butterflies, we have another lush, exotic scene even as two grotesque trunks go to battle. The one on the left looks ghostly, and one can even see a clear outline of a shoulder, which leads into strange, tentacle-like hands. The trunk on the left appears to be a leg, with a distinct knee where it crosses another plant. It is a giant, animal-like foot, then, that tries to stop the spectral tree. Or, since we have the title of “Catching Butterflies,” that foot is a claw capturing its prey. I would argue that the absence of any human form in both these works lends itself to the gothic, yet because Arthur uses smoke as her artistic medium, the landscapes takes on an ethereal quality.

Frente a frente, 2013

The drawings “are created by elevating paper over a candle and allowing the smoke to create marks, tones and shapes onto the surface, which then the image is slowly teased out after adding each layer of smoke,” Arthur explains. “The smoke’s natural illusiveness and unpredictability became a natural choice for experimenting and creating a body of work through unconventional means. One of the overarching themes in all of my work is the exploration of media and adaptation of discarded materials such as objects or things of ephemeral nature as smoke, and converting these materials into something different.”

In Frent a Frente, one can see these themes of abandonment, such as the graffiti face grimacing in the background. Double eyed, hallucinatory and somewhat threatening, the yellow face is in a direct line with the yellow sail boat in the foreground and the ambiguous house-like structures above it. It is a scene of wondrous decay as it appears that a unearthly jungle has grown over all the human-made structures. To the right, a young boy in board shorts surveys the scene. We can’t see any expression on his face, yet the position of his arm doesn’t show any fear necessarily. It is the woman hunching by his stomach, one eye wide, the other, defaced, that adds a more threatening element to the scene. From her position we can’t tell if she is looking at something on the boy’s stomach or looking beyond it. Her mouth is hidden by his midriff, adding a very ambiguous tension there–is it sexual? Is she sucking poison out of a wound? Frente a frente means “face to face,” and yet here we have fractured glances and profiles so intention is completely in the realm of audience. Arthur explains that such uncertainties frame the series as a whole: “I was interested in perception and the psychology of viewing. Fumage, the formal name for this technique, is in fact, reflections of smoke captured on paper… inspired by film noir and Japanese art from the Edo period the smoke drawings contemplatively capture a dreamlike trace or essence of a psychological constructed space.”

The Wasteland, 2012

The surreal nature of Wasteland keeps it on the very edge of horror and humor. The young man in the foreground sports contemporary clothes while behind him, the tribesmen with spears and blowguns behind him seem from another time and place. They are running, but the young is not, and so we have even more dissonance in their relationship. Is he the reluctant leader of this wraith-like gang, given the hunting club logo on his shirt? His look is not one of someone spotting a kill, but rather a kind of placid resignation. Could he even be waiting to be captured rather than outrun them? Given his size substantial height difference and youth, one would think he had a fair chance of escaping his captors should we wish to. But in a true wasteland, where does one run to for refuge? The beautiful trees in the background and moon-dusted sky contradict the idea that this is an apocalyptic setting, so perhaps it is not so much the landscape that is seen as a wasteland but a sense of home? Of identity?

Arthur’s  Smoke Drawings have a visually arresting narrative that I have only begun to scratch the surface of in this article. There are 39 drawing in the series, each work casting its own story while whispering to the others. It is a journey into a phantom world full of sensuality and abandonment, otherness and discovery, the kind of landscape meant to birth new stories in all of us.

All images used with permission of the artist.

To see more of Arthur’s work, please visit her website: http://daphnearthur.com

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And from this “nautilus shell” of his seventeenth century house “wherein time has stopped,” Arrivabene’s masterful paintings in turn have the ability to stop time and create suspended intense moments outside quotidian time. Arrivabene has written of his work as forming a “wunderkammern” or “a room of curiosities,” such as those created to display the trophies brought back by adventurers returning from foreign expeditions. This points to the painter, Arrivabene, as an explorer  returning with  bizarre and extraordinary fragments or treasures  from  strange, new visionary worlds.

Swimmer of Abysses, 2012

After his initial training at art school, in which, Arrivabene says, he learnt next to nothing, he toured around Europe and studied the paintings of old masters. He researched how to grind his own pigments, lapis lazuli, indigo, cinnabar and madder, dragon’s blood, orpiment and bistre, and almost forgotten techniques of painting like mischtechnik, a painting technique used by artists such as Albrech  Dürer and Grünewald. In mischtechnik, egg tempera is used in combination with oil-based paints to create translucent layers which, when laid over each other, refract light through the painting creating a sense of light and luminosity. This attention to the minutiae of his craft has resulted in Arrivabene’s paintings  actually embodying a process of alchemical  transformation,  in which  the physical matter of painting itself, the lead, the ground pigment, the egg, the oil,  is transmuted through the agency of his craft  into extraordinary  light-filled visions. The other notable thing about Arrivabene’s work is how densely saturated it is with the history of painting, as his works resonate with a lineage of visionary artists from the past – we can see glimpses of Francisco Goya, Leonardo da Vinci, Gustave Moreau, William Blake, Odd Nerdrum, and even in some of his pencil drawings, Mervyn Peake. And yet, despite this sense of continuity and connection with past masters, Arrivabene’s work feels fresh, contemporary, and distinctly his own.

Light with, in Arrivabene’s words, a “blue pearl color much like that of the exhumed dead” is visible in his 2011 painting Martyrium S. Dorotea, of the martyrdom of Saint Dorothy. The disturbing blue of the flesh is visible in the back of the naked woman who is turned away from us. Her body is painted in a level of detail reminiscent of the realism of Lucien Freud, who has been widely characterized as depicting his models with a forensic focus, creating a dispassionate, unsparing vision of the body. Yet from this forensic portrayal of the blue-tinged flesh of the body in this painting, Arrivabene has used the same pearl blue color to create extraordinary plants and flowers growing directly out of the flesh of the woman’s upper back and shoulders. The materiality of the paint itself underscores the inter-relationship of the matter of the woman’s flesh and these plants. In a sideways glance to the symbolic landscape backgrounds of renaissance portraits, flames are painted in the background behind the woman, representing the heat and pain of the dying flesh.

Martyrium S. Dorothea, 2011

Ultimately, the physical pain of the body is represented, and yet we see in this painting the transmutation of pain and suffering, and its metamorphosis into the fantastic. Arrivabene says that one result of his mother dying when he was very young is that it let him move beyond the taboos associated with death, and showed him new ways of considering life, and “so death became for [him] the way to amazement and wonder.” This painting on one level references the story of the martyrdom of St Dorothy, in which at her death an angel appeared bearing flowers and fruit for her persecutors, but it can also be read as an embodied metaphor about the relationship of death to life, and how life itself re-emerges in different forms through the process of the disintegration and absorption of the physical matter of the dead and dying body.

In the 2010 painting Ea Exit, the firmaments of da Vinci and H.R. Giger collide with a lateral reference to the Hans Holbein painting The Ambassadors. Ea Exit references the top third, the head and upper torso, of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa,or La Gioconda. The two paintings share a backdrop of what Arrivabene calls “a wild uninhabited space of rocks and water stretching to the horizon” placed at the height of the eyes of the central figure, suggesting an unknowable, untamable element to the subject herself.   The two paintings also both show women with strange, mesmerizing smiles. The famous, unfathomable smile of the Mona Lisa has inspired much speculation as to its origin, including one suggestion that the smile is in fact a visual representation of the Italian word ”Gioconda”, which translates as the word “happiness”, but also refers to the married name of the subject of the painting, who is believed by many to have been Lisa Gheradini, the wife of Francesco Giocondo.

Ea Exit, 2010

The girl in the Arrivabene painting is smiling too, and her smile is equally enigmatic, looking as though it is turned inwards and is part of her internal state of being. She seems almost ecstatic. The hair of the girl portrayed in the Arrivabene painting is curly and unruly, escaping its restraints, and the small tight curls on the top of her head take on the form of little skulls. The skulls gradually increase in size, and are seen floating away from her head tethered to her only by trails of light. They form a headdress of skulls of all different shapes and sizes: children’s skulls, bird’s skulls, aliens’ skulls (which reference Giger’s drawings), and coroneted skulls. At the front of the painting we see a skull that has grown so large it has become untethered from her headdress and is moving around her, leaving a trace of itself behind it as it moves. The shape of it references the anamorphic skull seen in the Hans Holbein painting The Ambassadors. Arrivabene brings all these diverse influences together to create a stunning image, an ecstatic meditation on death, and on the unknowable mystery and strangeness of being itself.

The 2013 painting The Dream of Sappho, as a depiction of a state of creative being, is extraordinary. We see the poetess, her head turned away from the viewer, her eyes closed, and from the crown of her head a headdress of corals and pearls springs. Veiled, unreachable, the poetess dreams, her creative energy pushing its way through the bone limits of her skull, bringing new thoughts, new poetry into being, and transmuting her life force into the blood-formed corals and pearls of her poetry.

The Dream of Sappho, 2013

Arrivabene is becoming increasingly prolific and there are many new and wonderful works to be seen on his website. A small sample of his artistic portfolio is featured here as part of this article. The first major retrospective of Arrivabene’s work is being shown in the Panorama Museum in Bad Frankenhausen, Germany from 29 June to 30 October2013. The exhibition presents 20 years of the artist’s work.  One hundred and thirty works will be on display including paintings, drawings and etchings as well as many of his moleskin sketchbooks. You can visit this link to find out more about the exhibition.

I interviewed Agostino Arrivabene in the process of writing this article, back in June of this year.

Lavers: I have read that you live in an old manor house near Milan, and that you have a housekeeper who looks after you – is this right?

Arrivabene: Yes, this is partly true. The ‘manor’ is in fact not a manor but rather an old rural farmhouse in the middle of fields, surrounded by nature. My housekeeper is certainly an important woman who keeps me company

Life in the city does not suit my psychological disposition. I have always loved contact with nature, contact with water which should always be near human dwellings; the flow of the aqueous element is fundamental. It is liberating and purifying for both body and spirit. Water is the elixir that nourishes my thoughts, the panacea to my anxieties.

Lavers: I would like to ask you about your rhythm of working — What time of the day do you prefer to paint?

Arrivabene: There really are no rules in my life; I have never liked them. My spirit is free, I don’t like external conditions, and so when they present themselves, I disdain or shun them categorically. I don’t like impositions from collectors, from purchasers, and especially not from curators or art critics, who for me are a kind of satellite human category or species … revolving around my flow or my vision, which must not have any distractions.

Usually, however, morning is the time when I don’t paint. Waking is slow, very slow, in fact. The hours that I prefer to work are those evenings up very late at night or those long dark hours of winter afternoons.

Lavers: Do you ever use images from your dreams in your work? Is dreaming or lucid dreaming a part of your creative source material?

Arrivabene: Yes, often the dream-world during sleep is a source of inspiration and also of speculation … As a young man at the end of the 80s, I had a dream of an astral flight, a detachment from my body in order to experience the imaginative dimension, an instant flash which imprinted itself into my memory as soon as I woke up, becoming the most persistent obsession I have ever had. A bird’s eye view of a verdant Greek valley, of eternal and impenetrable forests, an intense green never seen in nature, a valley without end where the horizon could not be distinguished from a sky without earthly dimension, but more golden. This landscape guarded a small perfectly circular lake of an intense blue, comparable to the deepest blue of the rarest lapis lazuli, a lake that survived on the edge of an abyss, a nightmarish, bottomless, icy, black darkness, into which flowed a rivulet of water, a small waterfall that overflowed from the lake and fell in the darkness. It was an immediate image, persisting over the years and still now strong and clear. Many times it has been depicted in my paintings over the years, becoming almost a canon, a leitmotif that characterized every image.

Lavers:  How do you respond to the description of your works as ‘visionary’ – are you happy with this term? I am referring to the tradition of visionary art that is represented by artists such as Goya, Fuseli, Blake, Gustave Moreau and more recently Odd Nerdrum.

Arrivabene: The “visionary” works you mention in association with eminent examples of great artistic expression are, for me, reference points along my artistic development, and among those artists you listed, there are two in particular, though far removed from each other temporally, Gustave Moreau and Odd Nerdrum, two important poles that I have… studied in order to then distil them within my idiom, a personal style which constitutes my own poetic vision.

Lavers: I have seen you describe your work as ‘wunderkammern’ or ‘rooms of curiosities.’ This metaphor implies that you are, in some ways, an explorer venturing into unknown lands and returning with trophies or images from uncharted territories, in this case, of the mind. If this is so, what is your thinking about these fragments, these images, that you return with?

Arrivabene: The excavation work of my mind into my dark inner world is comparable to the journey of Persephone in Hades, or equally Orpheus’ journey into the underworld. They are travel rituals, Orphic or Eleusinian in their urgent desire to steal from the dark world flashes of truth, the glimpses of which are the keys to a parallel realm that must reveal the interior world through an accumulation of images or a babel of languages, the very mystery, just as eagerly sought by ancient civilisations…. My dream is to steal the royal crowns of Persephone and Hades, to bring them to men back on earth to help them understand the centrifugal mystery of life in regards to death, and death that gives rise to life. It is one of my greatest desires to give to the world such royal emblems; to deprive the ancient gods of their symbolic power.

Lavers: Your images would seem to evolve out of a heightened non-quotidian state of awareness.  How do you sidestep the rational part of your brain? Do you have any techniques for achieving this?

Arrivabene: I have never tried to give weight to the origin of an image. It emerges slowly, like botanical gemmation, or instantaneously, like an archetypal image. Sometimes only by overturning the orientation of the painting do I find the solution, and what was once a clear image. By turning the painting itself upside down, either vertically or horizontally, I find the solution that brings me towards a new painting, which layers onto the previous work a new vision, thus changing the meaning of the image.

It’s not surprising then that under the skin of many of my paintings are hiding actual burials of old images, whole paintings, hidden regrets that sometimes serve as a regenerating humus for the new image, which a new observation manages to perceive, transforming it into a new vision.

Blooming Man II, 2010

The means of altered consciousness have certainly always intrigued me, having been an assiduous reader of the works of Aldous Huxley, but drugs like tetrahydrocannabinols, or opium or hallucinogens, have never been close friends to me. Occasionally some soft drugs have sporadically helped overcome gestural blocks, but not very often. I don’t need them. The real source of connection with a stage of excitement is definitely music.

Music pervades my sessions of realising a work, completely, absolutely. And it is always powerful and symphonic music like that of Brahms, Beethoven and his symphonies, Bach and his Brandenburg concerts, or my favorite artists Mahler and Wagner, or Ciurlionis, who besides being an artist was also a composer of sublime musical pieces. Nor do I exclude new contemporary composers like Arvo Part, Sbignev Preisner, Vassilis Tsabropoulos, the band Sigur Ros, or Lisa Gerrard and Michael Nyman.

Lavers: Your work is informed by the work of so many artists — how do you see your relationship with these painters who have gone before you?

Arrivabene: I believe that history is a babel of knowing that is enclosed by human memory like a Borges-esque library. Everything that precedes us is like a cache of layered wisdom which nourishes new, still unexplored veins.

The history of art has been able to sharpen the gaze and the search for the ideals of beauty, of harmony, and of the mystery linked to these values. Art has become like a religion, and in these most recent years, artists have come to understand that we are like shamans, the perfect link between man and the imperishable, since before this period, art depicted religion, but now art is itself a religion.

This awareness has …[enabled me] to draw on this layered knowledge, ..[laid down by]and confirmed by illustrious minds of geniuses who have given much to the world, and in an age so full of confusion, chaos and languages ​​which hybridize with one another or annihilate each other unproductively, there still exists an underground river that even if hidden vibrates powerfully to enhance the enigma of beauty.

Gustave Moreau was our closest answer to Leonardo, a confirmation closer to my time, who was able to take from the Renaissance master a sense of harmony of forms. Gustave Moreau was, in my early formative years, the founder of a movement that I still felt vividly in the years from 1990 to 2000, and not overtaken by the avant-garde.

Moreau is one of those artists who represents in a single life the entire journey of the history of art. He is an encyclopedic dictionary of more extreme styles and languages; he shows us levels of maturation that anticipate the abstract painting that appeared following his artistic experience …. His capacity for synthesis of form and color are true experiences of the avant-garde for an artist of that era.

Odd Nerdrum on the other hand is clearly an inscrutable and fascinating artist, with an unbridled talent for the construction and texturing of a painting. He knows how to empathise with the pictorial ductus of Rembrandt and Titian or Eugène Carrière, with a capacity and self-assurance which is unique.

Lavers: You have said that ‘The hardest part of being an artist is that period of gestation, when the images prepare to emerge and forms sublimate, then…everything flows…” Where do you find the initial stirrings or the seeds of an image generally come from?”

Arrivabene: This question could have a single and simple answer. Obviously I could tell you that it is life itself that gives every opportunity to be translated into art, and certainly not the bucolic accumulation that current-day artists produce in relation to images, detaching them from the pathos of living.

But … every image that I construct … is the product of a definitively diversified method. For every painting there exists no single procedure, at times it can be a strong suggestion originating from an urgent desire to better focus on an idea captured by a philosopher, or from a story or a mythological reference, or sometimes it can be a specific fact that happens in my life, for better or for worse.

Painting is frequently the urgent medium for sublimating life. It is the medium that translates every dormant impulse, which risks festering in unresolved internal compartments. On the other hand it is at times the magnitude of the mystical quest which is decisive, and which in me becomes the fulcrum to lever archetypal images which are born either by chance or by unconscious surfacing, but which then over time express a meaning and show clearly that through this gesture or that painting, or that particular symbolic element, I wanted to highlight a mystery, still hidden within me, still unsolved and cryptic.

Floatings, 2010

Journeys are often the necessary pathways to be able to verify my thirst for knowledge and curiosity, like those multiple occasions on Greek soil where I confirmed my theories, and taste, or performative gesture, in order to then translate it into painting.

And in exactly the same way in large cities where museums and their collections become springboards to launch into daring experimental techniques. But then almost always the trip has also been in order to realize small sketchbooks of notes of germinal ideas, … which then mature and sometimes transform themselves into works, growing into more complex images. I have a collection of moleskins, hand-bound incunabula or leather notebooks, very simple, where life translates itself in a diary through images or written words, ideas as notes. I am very possessive of these fragments of writings and drawings, they are the furrows left by my life on this earth, enclosed in paper and pages.

Lavers: To see such a mastery of the techniques of draftsmanship and painting is extraordinary in these days when the system of apprenticeship and learning from masters has broken down almost entirely. How did you go about learning about the material processes of your art?

Arrivabene: In fact, I am at the end of a journey without haven or protective shelters. In my early formative years I definitely followed paths, at times purely academic and necessary, and subsequently followed paths which have also been daring or brave in the construction and drafting of an image.

Clearly I have not had master-teachers. My formation has been solitary, everything has come from myself alone, and also through dialogue with the great masters of the past, observing at great length their painting, daring too, at first, a rhetorical process and genuine attempts at reconstruction appropriate for the outset, studying these implementations in long sessions that filled my day. I preferred from the outset to do away with instinctive and random learning processes, rather pursuing the reconstruction of a bridge that could reconnect a blocked road, namely, that from the traditional craftsmanship of the handling of raw materials used in the masters workshops, bridging the enormous gaps in the processes of contemporary drawing and painting.

Apart from this aspect, from childhood, drawing has been for me the language through which I relate to others. I have never been a talkative person; in my younger years, my conversations were private and hidden in my mind between me and Leonardo [da Vinci], in whom I placed my faith from the outset.

Leonardo is the supreme master whom I have been able to observe from my early years. He is like a father who has guided my sign, my hand, my taste and a way to intuit the harmony of forms both drawn and in nature. He has educated my gaze right from the beginning, proof of which are my first preparatory studies of some paintings such as Nix, a small drawing on wood created with pencil and silver tip, which has strong echoes of the preparatory study of the Virgin Annunciate now in the Uffizi Gabinetto in Florence.

Proserpino Wetnurse, 2010

Lavers: “Debauched monasticism” is a phrase you have used to describe your life — it is a very intriguing description, I was wondering if you could elaborate?

Arrivabene: Certainly loneliness has always marked the progress of my days. I’ve always loved to surround myself with books which plumb those mysteries, inherent in humans, linked to the spirit, to mysticism; books of poetry or anthropology, myths, alchemy, esotericism and philosophy, precisely because they are texts that investigate the hidden wisdom inside us as well as that which is external to us, that is, of the universe that surrounds us and that pierces us.

My sense of religion is absolutely crucial for my pictorial gesture, for the inspiration of the ideas which subsequently emerge. I have always aspired to discover what lies beyond death, the mystery of that threshold that obligatorily completes man. I have never been satisfied with a superficial atheism, never satisfied with a relativism that now permeates the minds and hearts of most human beings.

Man is a lump of flesh and blood and bones that surrounds an eternal core, a memory that permeates the centuries and time and that is never interrupted, which flows continuously in a continuous surge, a rising towards a sharpening, such as a mathematical and numerical increase of the Golden Ratio. … It is no accident that I’ve always loved the Golden Form, that Golden Ratio implanted like a genetic code of the entire universe. Fibonacci is my guardian angel.

Lavers: I would like to ask you about the importance of the face in your work. It interests me how in some of your most evocative works the faces are completely or partially hidden – I am thinking of the paintings of Lucifer and the paintings of cherubim. Sometimes the faces are hidden in clouds of what look like bacteria as seen under a microscope. Does the face have a particular significance to you?

Arrivabene: The denial of the face is simply my introspection into myself, but at the same time also my outward reflection on the more mysterious dimension of existence.

The denial of a face obviously often corresponds with iconographic codes relating to deities, or demons/‘daemons’, or creatures superior to humans. The denied face is the kingship of God manifested in his denial to men, and his beauty is impossible to behold by the human eye; the denial of his face is the evocative act of a reality so ideal for human cognition. Clear examples are the painting of “Endymion” of 2007 and the painting of “Lucifer” in 1997, two visions which are mirror opposites: Endymion expresses its beauty through its very elimination by the bright light that assails his face at the moment of the erotic union with either the god or goddess, depending on the version of the myth, …. In one version of the story he is visited by Diana, in another by Zeus.

On the other hand, Lucifer, the biblical angel, is the most beautiful but also the darkest, and is therefore denied his attribute of beauty – his face – which thus reveals a gaping void, total blackness, a dark hole that engulfs, [capped by] his crown of floating flowers.

Bacteria are an atavistic obsession, an obsession born of my hypochondria, my absolute terror of disease.

Luci-fer, 1997

Lavers: What are you working on at the moment? Do you have any new work in mind?

Arrivabene: At the moment, after a long process of collection and planning, I am about to inaugurate my own retrospective exhibition at the Panorama Kunst Museum in Bad-Frankenhausen, Germany.

From 29 June to 20 October, more than 120 works will be exhibited to the public, works never seen before because they have been hidden in private collections, works which bring together over twenty years of my work and which the curators Gerd Lindnr and Rosaria Fabrizio have been able to collect, [curating them around]…the concept of Pathei Mathos, that is, an ancient Greek term which represents the search for truth or understanding through pathos, or rather, through pain and suffering; essentially the disquiet of life expressed by Aeschylus in the tragic opera Agamemnon.

I’m… starting to delve into Giordano Bruno and his ‘wheels of memory’. …I’ve also been working for some time on illustrations from Dante’s Divine Comedy, illustrating the entire work, all three canticles, hell, purgatory and paradise, which up till now I have kept hidden from the public as they are still works in progress.

Lavers: Are there any living visual artists, film-makers or musicians who particularly inspire you?

Arrivabene: The musicians I have already been mentioned. Artists are for the most part sources of inspiration and mainly stem from ancient art, without any creditable contemporary reference, apart from the very few and rare, such as Francis Bacon, Balthus, Lopez Garcia and Odd Nerdrum.

Lavers: What books have influenced you – are there any writers that you love and you see as having had an impact on your thinking and your work?

Arrivabene: The first were definitely the …poets, Rimbaud and Baudelaire above all, followed by Thomas Mann, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Joris Karl Huysmans, and definitely the philosophical works of Plato, of Marsilio Ficino, or the wonderful letters of Michelangelo Buonarroti, the archaeological works of Robert Bauval and the philosophical works of Giordano Bruno, and, more recently, the diaries of Simone Weil and the contemporary philosophy of Franco Rella.

Lavers: What are you reading now?

Agostino Arrivabene: At present I’m reading the De Umbris of Giordano Bruno and the Castello Interiore of St. Teresa of Avila.

Acknowledgements

Katie Lavers’ questions were translated from English to Italian by Paola Vertechi, from the Italian Institute of Culture in Sydney.

Agostino Arrivabene’s answers were translated from Italian into English by Neville Chiavaroli. An Italian and Latin translator, Neville Chiavaroli’s translation (with C. Mews) of a medieval Latin manuscript was published in The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard (St. Martin’s Press: New York, 2009).

References

1. Arrivabene Agostino, Tekne International 2006

www.nuovo-tekne.nohup.it/dett_artista.php?id_artista=13&lang=en‎

2. Artists and Writers Who Ignited Us in 2012, Combustus, December 22, 2012

www.Combustus.net

3. Agostino Arrivabene, Oil Painter, Milan, Italy,  Combustus, May 11, 2013

www.Combustus.net

4. Interview: Agostino Arrivabene, welcome to the Wunderkammer!  Chiara Sestini, C‑Heads, February 29 2012

www.c‑heads.com/…/interview-agostino-arrivabene-welcome-to-the-wun…‎

5. Mona Lisa — Portrait of Lisa Gheradini„ wife of Francesco del Giocondo, Louvre Museum Paris

www.louvre.fr/…/mona-lisa-–-portrait-lisa-gherardini-wife-francesco-del…‎

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