Wednesday, January 6, 2010

A Hypochondriac's Guide to Paint

Being the hypochondriac that I am, and since I can't seem to get through a day of painting without ending up covered from head to foot. I thought it might be a good idea to check the toxicity of my colours. Here are some of the worst offenders in my paint box.

WARNING! HORROR AHEAD!



Cobalt Blue




It's named after a Goblin or 'Kobold' on account of it's discovery in German silver mines (where goblins were thought to live). After reading up on it I'm inclined to think its malevolent nature can only be ascribed to tiny minions of satan.




This is also the most expensive paint. More expensive than silver...Maybe... Which is why I don't use it much...Thank GOD.

Anyway:

Cobalt poisoning can occur when you are exposed to large amounts of cobalt. There are three basic ways that cobalt can cause poisoning. You can swallow too much of it, breathe too much into your lungs, or have it come in constant contact with your skin. ( like me)
The invisible Kobold Goblins will then work their magic thus:
Your heart will become so big and floppy that it can't pump blood , Your nervous system will cease to function properly. It also causes Thyroid problems, Thickening of the blood... And other symptoms I won't go into here.





The only way to antidote it is to find the offending Goblin and kill it with holy water.





Vermilion






Contains mercury Which will kill you dead, but not before dissolving your brain slowly, until you are a quivering, insane, wreck. It also gives you something called 'Pink Disease' which is less charming than it sounds. In Victorian times Mercury was an ingredient in a solution used in the making of hats. Hence the term 'Mad as a Hatter.'




It was also an ingredient in various medicines including a teething remedy. Hell, they probably knocked back shot glasses of the stuff. In fact it can be found today in amalgam filings, tuna and vaccinations. I don't see why I should worry. People in Victorian times had long, healthy lives right?



Cadmium Red.




Hoo boy!

This one will start out looking like flu , then bad flu then really bad flu... Then shrinks your kidneys, and softens your bones until they are fractured by your OWN BODY WEIGHT. Then , luckily for you, you go into a coma. I forget what happens next...


Oh right


Manganese Blue





This one worries me as I use it all the time, and I won't stop. Even though I now know the grisly manner of my own demise.

As the name suggests contains manganese. As well as creating a lovely greeny blue shade it will...

A. Affect my brain chemistry in the same way as schizophrenia.
B. Give me symptoms akin to a delightful combination of Parkinson's disease , Lou Gehrig's disease and multiple sclerosis.
C.Destroy all my internal organs.

... And pretty much every other terrifying symptom you can imagine. In fact if you swallow Manganese you'll be lucky if you don't end up melting into a puddle of fluids like that senator guy from the X-Men... How Mystique managed to survive being dipped in the stuff remains a mystery.



Not recommended



Flake White




Flake White and various others are made from lead. This is the same paint people in the 1600s put all over their faces. The first signs that it might not have been a great idea to paint yourself with lead would have been... Pain, muscle weakness and pins and needles. Then over the long term you would become less intelligent and non-verbal reasoning, short-term memory, fine motor skills, emotional regulation, and social engagement would be destroyed.

In other words you would be part of the generation that spawned the Marquis de Sade, thought the castrati were a good idea, and wore wigs so gigantic that they got caught in chandeliers.




I think I'll just dispose of the flake white in a controlled explosion.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

'Wet'





Ireland 2009

The forgetful earth of home,
leaves no traces.
A fall is met with spongy moss.
Liquid lives in everything,
dripping through soft rounded edges.
Melting caves beneath

Where joy and love and grief can be preserved.
Untold, unfelt and silent.
Seeping through the layered bog.
Where sacrificial victims lie,
with children’s shoes and cooking pots.
Great blackened oaks.

Our surface keeps it’s secrets,
and the soft, sweet creatures of lake and hill,
weave spells about the water.
As they whisper to us:
‘Come lie down
And sleep in quiet, green places
and keep you heart's desire
at the bottom of the well.’

© Diana Muller 2008

'Dry'



Arizona 2008

Sixty million years of heat,
Have frozen terrible print's in time.
The Harsh dead ground,
Turns living things to stone.
Trees and flesh and bone,
Become immutable.

The land itself a testament.
The Titans of creation fossilised.
Their faces frozen in the jagged spires and peaks.
Scattered Coral shows the shaping sea,
The marks of the tide etched, visable and still.
into red rock.

A Crusifix glares white in the sun,
but you will not find that here.
This is an older land,
Where yeilding things do not remain
This land remembers,
And is unforgiving.

© Diana Muller 2008

Sunday, August 16, 2009

T shirt Shop


Ladies and Gent's I'd like to draw your attention to a Tshirt shop that my esteemed associate John and I have started up.

Like TV?

Like obscure TV references?

You'll love

http://www.cafepress.com/jamworks

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

My top 5 weirdest artists -No.1 Henry Darger

Henry Darger - is RIGHT BEHIND YOU!



Nobody thunk it

The world of American folk art is , of course rife with eccentricity but Darger was certinly ahead of the curve. They say there is a fine line between genius and insanity and Henry Darger pole vaulted over that line and then ran screaming over into insanity covered with excrement , tearing his clothes off.

Known locally around his Chicago neighbourhood as 'That old hobo who talks to himself ' Darger died in 1973. His landlords, upon clearing out his apartment, found that he was the author of "The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion” the worlds longest fictional novel at 15,145 total pages. About two people have read the entire thing and both went insane after the first five pages. They also found a 10 year daily weather journal and an eight volume, 5,084-page autobiography.

The tale is of child heroes and evil warriors on another planet fighting a battle that resembles the civil war. Darger appears as a character multiple times in his own story as both hero and villain alternately saving the seven Christian 'Vivian girls' from heathen 'Glandelinian' soldiers and slaughtering them in ways too horrible to transcribe. It had hundreds of illustrations, large brightly coloured fantasy landscapes, his human figures were traced from magazines.


Er...

Having way with words and evidently highly intelligent Darger had been placed in an adult mental asylum after his parents death and his diagnosis with the condition of 'self abuse' (don't you just love the olden days?) and only escaped at the age of 19 which does kind of explains the whole craziness thing.


Ye Olde Psychiatrist


Darger is commonly believed to have had no significant relationship with another human being in his life and it is supposed that he never saw a woman naked (Would you have dated him?) This may explain why all the little girls in his story (often depicted naked ) have penises...Yes you read correctly . It doesn't not explain ,however, why he depicted them strangled, decapitated and dismembered so often in his work.


Yeah...You don't want to see that



Craziest Moment

It depends on who you believe, his whole life was pretty much one long crazy moment but...


It may be significant that the incident in Darger's mythos that starts the Glandeco-Angelinian War is ‘the loss of a photograph of Elsie Paroubek'. Well if you the into account that Elsie Paroubek was a 10 year old murder victim , killed just after Darger escaped from the asylum and correlate the two events then....You may just have a moment that stood out . Not that I'm saying... Well Um...Yeahhh. Can you libel the dead?


Did you know?

That there is a crazy old man living in the apartment above you writing a 30,000 page epic about a family of mice? Oh...and there are heads in his fridge.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

My top 5 weirdest artists -No.2 William Blake -The Mystic

William Blake -The Mystic



''Holy Shit! An angel!''




Ok I know he's better known for his poetry than his painting but like the individual that stole the top spot Blake's writing and pictures combine to form an epic mythology. As weird as he was Blake is still by far the coolest person on this list.
Blake was ahead of his time as a slavery abolitionist, feminist and critic of the Church. Such things made him a social outcast during his life.
In fact he was so far ahead of his time we have yet to catch up with him and he is widely regarded as batshit insane. He experienced 'visions' from an early age when seeing the face of 'God' through a window caused the 4 year old Blake to scream hysterically.


Blake may have been dyslexic


After that he spoke with ghosts and saw Angels on a regular basis.


'The Ghost of a Flea'


A living flea




He also made up his own religion . He was the L. Ron Hubbard of his era. He wrote several philosophical 'Prophetic' books outlining his world view including characters like the Evil creator God Urizen, Tharmas the God of Strengh, Urthona imagination and Luvah or love, also known as 'Orc'. Actually maybe he was 'The J.R.R. Tolkien of his era.



Blake on a normal Saturday night

Did you know?

Blake once said:

''Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction.''
William Blake

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

My top 5 weirdest artists -No.3 Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali - A Man Posessed




Salvador Dali was one of the most intriguing men in the history of art, melding psychology, spirituality and physics into a complex artistic web...Now with that out of the way I can focus on telling his true life story for the rest of the blog.





Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, (really) was born on May 11, 1904, at 8:45 a.m. GMT in the town of Figueres, in the Empordà region, close to the French border in Catalonia, Spain. As if having seven , hard to spell, names wasn't traumatic enough he was also the only little boy in his school with a moustache.(after extensive google searching I have found no pictures of a clean shaven Dali, which can only lead me to conclude that he was,in fact, born with the moustache.) This set him apart from the other children and he was called 'Hair lip' at school, causing him to run away to Milan at the age of 12, hoping to graduate from the Art Academy there.

Salvador Dali , shortly after birth



The moustache had other plans.

In the beginning it was content to be an average , if well kept 'Tache. The mild mannered Dali pampered it, swelled its ego and it began to bully him. Soon the opinionated moustache was finishing his sentences for him and forcing him to agree with it's radical ideas.Dalí was expelled from the Academia in 1926, shortly before his final exams, when he stated that no one on the faculty was competent enough to examine him. No one could understand why he would say such a thing. It was so unlike him.


It was at about this time when his skills as a painter suddenly improved drastically with no apparent reason. he made his first visit to Paris, where he met with Pablo Picasso. By this time the moustache had become a diva, demanding to be waxed at least 5 times a day and decorated according to the season.





More moustache now, than man, Dali surrendered to it's will.





The moustache began to evolve...Possibly growing into his brain, totally eclipsing Dali's personality. The Moustache had ambition and talent and it became one of the worlds greatest artists.


Its True.




The Moustache had a long and very successful life. Only succumbing to greyness at the age of 106.