SECRET OF THE DOLLHOUSE

Dead monkey.

I'm working on a secret project with my childhood dollhouse. I haven't seen anyone use their dollhouse this way and hope my idea is original. Every time you have a good idea you have to act fast, sorta claim it as your own with a big bright x, because somehow, in that very moment, it's out there, in the common consciousness. It might sound exaggerated, but I've seen it happen so many times. So hear, hear, secretive though I am, I'm a-claimin'.

Washed ashore, on top of the sofa.

a t o m o g r a d

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In these days of revolutions, tsunamis and earthquakes I move through blogomagic 25 years back in time, to the days of the peaceful atom (мирный атом), more specifically the ghost town of Pripyat, Ukraine. This atom city (атомоград) got a short lifetime, 1970 - 1986. May 1st the new amusement park was to be opened, on April 26th the Chernobyl disaster happened and April 28th the town was evicted, the amusement park never used. Animals and plants have completely taken over.

Today there are guided tours going to Pripyat and Chernobyl from Kiev. Would you dare to or like to go?

I still remember the radioactive rains.

2 0 1 1

My portfolio has been updated! You can find it in English and in Swedish. It was nice with a good pictorial spring cleaning.

a . m a n . o f . o n e . f a c e . a n d . o n e . f a c e . a l o n e

I love the secrets of a city, and this hidden bridge leading to a private door by a gallery, I would never say no to. It holds the same romance to me as the first pic in this post by Mette of Ungt Blod, an urban beauty. And the glass window, and the light hitting the colour and texture of the walls, the very dark door, swallowing you as you enter your home, the colour of his trenchcoat. Love it.

Yestereve was a left wing terrorist affair for me and the Glenn, watching the TV dramas Mogadischu (2008) and Carlos the Jackal - man of a thousand faces (2010). The latter was quite the let down after a promising beginning, from the crappy script it seemed Carlos actually never disguised himself (not a single disguise during the whole film - hello, a thousand faces!) but spent most of his time bragging, swimming in luxurious pools and receiving blow jobs from German "feminists".

I've got to go now, I have an idea, and must immediately run up to the attic storage and revisit my childhood. Let's see what I'll do to it.

Pics from Carlos the Jackal.

WE MAKE THE RED THREAD - UPDATED

Ernst Haeckel - Phaeodaria. Link.

Last Sunday when I wrote of Ernst Haeckel, Lisa commented that his illustrations reminded her of Anna-Karin Brus' Vanitas paintings:

Anna-Karin Brus - Stolen kiss. Link.

Last evening, the same day as I blogged about bowerbirds, it so happened that...

Bowerbird, hello! Link.

...we attended electronica radio show P2 Ström's bar evening at Snotty, where Lisa bought Liminal's 12" The Dendrites...

Liminals - The Dendrites. Link.

...with record sleeve art by Anna-Karin Brus, depicting - pause for dramatic effect - a bowerbird. We make the red thread.

(It seems nearly everybody who sees the sleeve, go: "Vulva". I actually didn't see it. But this is all a different story.)

(Sorry for the Liminals mini pic, I can't find a bigger one. Should anyone have one, please e-mail me and I'll post it.)
Darijo Berkes from Technogenic, Liminals' record label, sent me a bigger pic. Thanks!

a . n e s t . o f . o n e s . o w n

"Little house on the prairie" inside "The secret garden". Link.

A white pebble floor inside and a matching white plastic ring outside. Link. 

This bird wants a girl who likes blue. Link.

Red flowers, red plastic, white shells, an elaborate work in progress. Link.

The man inside the radio told me of the bowerbird, and Wikipedia elaborated:

"The most notable characteristic of bowerbirds is their extraordinarily complex courtship and mating behaviour, where males build a bower to attract mates. / ... / In and around the bower the male places a variety of brightly colored objects he has collected. These objects — usually different among each species — may include hundreds of shells, leaves, flowers, feathers, stones, berries, and even discarded plastic items, coins, nails, rifle shells, or pieces of glass. The males spend hours arranging this collection."

The man inside the radio spoke of the ridiculousness of this behaviour and how we human beings are just the same, choosing the most powerful, rich, endowed mate possible, how love can never transgress the animal in us. (He also said that he'd been with the richest women, the true Hollywood wives, how they had tried to love him, but couldn't, because he wasn't rich enough. Now he'd stopped having sex because it was too animal and would move to a tree house in the countryside and live by nature. He worked with - you've guessed it - decorating restaurants with the gaudiest, showiest, matchiest of pebbles and pearls. Does it remind you of something?)

My minds eye skips the harshness of survival and focuses on the beautiful shapes of these nests, the endeavour, the matchiness and the selection, the she birds coming to inspect what might for a little while be their shelter. There are so many variations on this theme. It's very how I'd like "The secret garden" to be, should I ever get to be the one to discover it.
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v a l k y r i a

These days when I wake up with serious, gloomy eyes, I need my women larger than life, antlered, blond, disco balled valkyrias, like those of Chris March. His book is exactly what my inner doctor would order, had my inner doctor patients that payed.

BEAUTIFUL SCIENCE

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"Gilman's dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and baffingly disordered sound; abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own entity, he could not even begin to explain. The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably angled masses of alien-hued substance, some of which seemed organic while others seemed inorganic. In the later dreams he began to distinguish separate categories into which the organic objects appeared to be divided, and which seemed to involve in each case a radically different species of conduct-pattern and basic motivation. All the objects - organic and inorganic alike - were totally beyond description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic masses to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate Arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation. The shrieking , roaring confusion of sound which permeated the abysses was past all analysis as to pitch, timbre, or rhythm; but seemed to be synchronous with vague visual changes in all the indefinite objects, organic and inorganic alike."

H.P. Lovecraft - "The Dreams in the Witch House".

Suddenly I was struck by the - to me! - obvious correlation between H.P. Lovecraft's stories and Ernst Haeckel's drawings.

It was in the summer of 2004 that I first saw Haeckel's master piece "Kunst und natur" in my friend Karoline's wonderful, sunny, Berlin flat on Boxhagener Allé. The book was lying on the enormous vintage light table, a former shop sign, that is her desk.
  His pictures were detailed, precise, unpleasant and beautiful, the shapes familiar yet outerwordly. The objects seemed to once have contained life and that they could at any moment spring to life again. I got the same nauseous feeling as I get when I read Lovecraft's accounts accounts of realms you can only reach by witchcraft.

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i n . c o l o u r

This is part four, the last in my Konstfack application series, see part three, part two and part one.

Assignment four, the last one, was called colour: Choose a colour you like or find interesting. Research it historically, culturally, socially and physically. Formulate an idea, illustrate it and add a short explanatory text.

I knew straight away that I wanted to do white. Not because it's my favourite colour but because I find it interesting with its inclinations of purity. Also I'm very fascinated with white torture ever since I read Jutta Ditfurth's book about Ulrike Meinhof. I had this idea of being obliterated by white, and so I covered black ink drawings with white and silver thread. It was tedious fun.

This is what I wrote:

In medieval times European queens wore white to express the deepest sorrow. In ancient Egypt white represented the lifeless desert while black was the colour of life. White torture is when you isolate a prisoner dressed in white, in a white, soundproofed, constantly lit room, isolated from all stimuli, even the sounds that we normally refer to as silence. In the white absence the prisoner is broken down, thought and focus hindered, you hallucinate. Encompassed in the white you lose your personality and the history of your personality. Japanese brides wear white to represent the death of their former family when they join their new one.

On another note: Tonight we DJ the flexi once more! Colouroïd at Babajan, Katarina Bang 75, Stockholm, 21 - 01. Welcome!

t h e . s e c r e t s . o f . s t o r y t e l l i n g

This is part three of my Konstfack application series, part two was posted yesterday and part one the day before.

Assignment three was called storytelling, a word I kinda love, at least in English, describe an event or something you've experienced in your life. After some brooding I decided I wanted to do something about growing up in Märsta, a suburb far far away from Sthlm, and after school commuting as often as I could to Sthlm. A lot of time was spent on trains, which has instilled in me a fear and loathing for commuting and a strange love for trains. I tried to reproduce the 1993 - 1995 content of my bag. No cell phone. A portable CD-player, though I think I still sometimes had a walkman, and a CD case. Palestina scarf and army "half mittens". A diary and pens for drawing and writing. Make up and lenses. I was constantly snivelly and my lips dry, so tissues and lip balm. I got so into this assignment that it wasn't until much later that I realized I had forgotten to include a book (Bram Stoker's Dracula would have been perfect, I bought it around that time) or a comic like Neil Gaiman's Sandman, a series I revered. I hit myself in the head over this. The end result was a photo that I colourized, a look I love.

Whilst I was at it I took a photo of my contemporary bag content and sent both to Dos Family's Facebook page. The difference in reproduction and real life was astounding. The amounts of nonsense, things you can't imagine you carry with you, depending on what you're at the moment into, startled me and made my reproduction seem kinda dry and impersonal:

Sorry for the photo quality, it was a quickie job.

Embroidery kit, magazine with a picture I like, cameras, notepad, wallet, socks given to me by my mother, empty mini Jack Daniels bottles that I haven't drunk but liked the look of, loose money, pens and eraser, and of course the obligatory tissues and lip balm.

Tomorrow is the last part of this series, colour.

t h r e e . t i m e s . t h e . c o n n e c t i o n

So, this is part two of my Konstfack application series, part one was posted yesterday.

This assignment was called connection. You were to pick a sentence and I chose "It's the thin thin layers", I'm not sure why, and on that theme make one poster, one illustration and then choose a format of any kind and illustrate for that. This task took me the longest, simply because I couldn't get it right. First I had a completely different idea, then I made it in pencil which didn't come out well.

I was really inspired by this, the right pic from this post, it's the one that set it off. Funny enough it's the one illustration of these three that I'm the least content with. I'm really happy with them, I love drawing with pen, the meticulousness and the pattern aspect. I've longed to dwell in pleats and I hardly ever draw people. It was good fun and it makes me want to work as an illustrator even more.

KABCDOSCOPE

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"Let's begin."

A...

...B...

...C...

...D...

...and E.

 
"The letters lie anonymous higgledy-piggledy until you can find their mutual identities, patterns and meaning. In the Kabcdoscope we spy on them and fantasize about the patterns they make, one by one, and together. The Kabcdoscope triggers the fantasy of the letters endless possibilities. In the book the letters lie in alphabetical order. You can also take out the pages, mix them up and guess which letter that forms the pattern."

Wow, this was hard for me to translate and it still sounds a little funny, and then I've written the original text myself. I thought I'd show you some of my plan B, the backdoor I've sometimes mentioned that I'll use in case things haven't picked up by autumn - oh, but they must have. Part of the plan is further education in illustration and graphic design at Konstfack.

So, task one, make an ABC book. I made an ABC kaleidoscope and took photos of the patterns, which was a lot of fun. I love me a good kaleidoscope. Tomorrow I'll show you task two of four, connection.
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