does anyone have that unsettling oil painting of a dark window with a sheet leading out into the darkness? it did the rounds on tumblr a while ago and i need itttt
this picture is so funny to me like the faggot radiating off this image is so warm i could heat my home… he literally went to home depot and bought the finest grade finnish wood 1x12 that cost at least $15 and then put it in a tiny plastic bag…. camp
the tight $3 fruit of the loom shirt tucked into those straight leg denim jeans, he may as well be in drag
This is absolutely fascinating. I’ve now been looking at Alex Colville’s paintings and trying to work out what it is about them that makes them look like CGI and how/why he did that in a world where CGI didn’t exist yet. Here’s what I’ve got so far:
- Total lack of atmospheric perspective (things don’t fade into the distance)
- Very realistic shading but no or only very faint shadows cast by ambient light.
- Limited interaction between objects and environment (shadows, ripples etc)
- Flat textures and consistent lighting used for backgrounds that would usually show a lot of variation in lighting, colour and texture
- Bodies apparently modelled piece by piece rather than drawn from life, and in a very stiff way so that the bodies show the pose but don’t communicate the body language that would usually go with it. They look like dolls.
- Odd composition that cuts off parts that would usually be considered important (like the person’s head in the snowy driving scene)
- Very precise drawing of structures and perspective combined with all the simplistic elements I’ve already listed. In other words, details in the “wrong” places.
What’s fascinating about this is that in early or bad CGI, these things come from the fact that the machine is modelling very precisely the shapes and perspectives and colours, but missing out on some parts that are difficult to render (shadows, atmospheric perspective) and being completely unable to pose bodies in such a way as to convey emotion or body language.
But Colville wasn’t a computer, so he did these same things *on purpose*. For some reason he was *aiming* for that precise-but-all-wrong look. I mean, mission accomplished! The question in my mind is, did he do this because he was trying to make the pictures unsettling and alienating, or because in some way, this was how he actually saw the world?
omf i never thought i’d find posts about alex colville on tumblr, but! he’s a local artist where i’m from & i work at a library/archives and have processed a lot of documents related to his art. just wanted to give my two cents!
my impression is that colville did see the world as an unsettling place and a lot of his work was fueled by this general ~malaise?? but in a lot of cases, he was trying to express particular fears or traumas. for instance, this painting (horse and train) was apparently inspired by a really tragic experience his wife had:
iirc she was in a horrible automobile crash, as the car she was in collided with a train. i find it genuinely horrifying to look at, knowing the context, but a lot of colville’s work is like that? idk he just seems to capture the feeling you get in nightmares where everything is treacle-ish and slow and inevitable.
When I was growing up in the 90s, in the days before search engines and everyone being online all the time, I saw plenty of trans women, just as sob stories directed at cis people on daytime television, freakshows directed at cis people on daytime television, the punchlines to hateful and violent jokes broadcast at all hours, and as a species of sexual fetish available to the consumers of niche websites and periodicals. The horizons of the possible to me looked like that: you could be someone else’s tragedy or someone else’s fantasy. The possibility of living a normal and dignified life seemed marginal. There were resources for trans people but they were aimed at adults. There were groups, online and off, aimed at adults. There were definitely trans people living normal-ish lives like mine, but they weren’t people I was supposed to know or see. Society insisted they were dangerous to me.
I want to finish this with a joke, like “Good thing our benevolent corporate overlords have decided we had it too good for too long and brought back the fetish/corpse dichotomy”, but it’s not even just them. Trans people, trans women especially, and our silly little culture and our silly little jokes and our silly little attempts to find and know each other make cis people who, in their view, have to endure them - those things make them seethe. It is an upset to this social situation, this social situation they consider the natural order, which they grew up with and internalized as much as we did, that we have the audacity to see ourselves in things besides jerkoff mags and human corpses. I suggest they die mad about it, and I suggest everyone who shares their frustration die mad about it
There is a depth of feeling to this, a satirisation, almost, of the forms of art that feels intensely artistic. The way he trails off into the cracks, blurring the line between the man and the environment he’s a part of; it is really beautiful, honestly. The fact it’s made out of urine evokes Piss Christ, but it’s less angry, more whistful. It says something about randomness. About how we see our own forms in the greater entropy of the universe. I cannot emphasise enough how much this means to me.
The fact that it imitates the forms of Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog? It’s a scathing piece of satire, and it was completely random. It’s a streak of piss made by a small dog on a forgotten, tired concrete bollard. It couldn’t criticise Romanticism harder if it tried.
continuing with the goth-ification of fairytale illustrations… this one is inspired by this: (Dugald Stewart Walker “The Peacock and the Wishing Fairy and Other Stories” 1921)
Look. I’m going to be honest with you. Adopting that hard anti-plastic surgery stance while trans people’s lives and right to transition is at stake is absolutely horrendous timing. Knock it off.
Plastic surgery saves and rebuilds lives. While anti-aging culture and lookism are both detrimental to society, it’s important to remember that plastic surgery is healthcare.
People in the tags are nottttt getting it. I’m saying you should address the societal influences that lead young women to seek plastic surgery before you seek to villianize the plastics field and/or limit access to healthcare to anyone. Plastic surgery is healthcare.
I am not making this a ‘trans people versus feminists against lookism’ issue. You may require plastic surgery in your lifetime as well. Anyone could. The line of where plastic surgery is frivolous and driven by vanity or necessary for maintaining or creating a greater quality of life is far thinner than you think. That nose job may have been motivated by Eurocentric beauty standards or it may have been motivated by the desire to correct a deviated septum. I am saying that at a time when we are all losing our bodily autonomy and access to medical care at an alarming rate, now is not the time to be writing treatises on why access to certain forms of healthcare is bad.
