In doing this exercise, I found it extremely challenging to narrow down the list of artists who I identify with and/or inspire me most. Nevertheless, here are the fifteen visual artists that have shaped my creative journey over the years.
William Blake
Leonora Carrington
Hilma af Klint
Salvador Dalí
Marc Chagall
Pablo Picasso
Carl Jung
Hieronymus Bosch
Nick Bantock
Matta
Ernst Haeckel
Georgiana Houghton
Matthieu Hackière
Wassily Kandinsky
Edward Gorey
The artists that inspire me most examine the occult, spirituality and/or have a gothic/sepulchral quality to their work. My list consists of modern and postmodern artists that incorporate elements of surrealism, abstract, collage, and figurative work. Some of these artists are both writers and illustrators (e.g., Blake, Bantock, Gorey, Jung), while others were associated with other vocations (e.g., Jung, Haeckel).
Because my work vacillates between abstract, surreal, and figurative art, it’s difficult for me to identify with any one particular movement. Furthermore, my list would have carried on for pages if I had included fashion designers (e.g., Alexander McQueen), filmmakers (e.g., David Lynch, Tim Burton), musicians (e.g., Steve Roach, Max Corbacho, Christian Löffler), etc.
Christian Löffler | Live at Fontaine de Vaucluse, France | 2018
Tim Burton | Scene from Edward Scissorhands | 1990
In one form or another, all of these artists evoke a sense of the numinous, the ethereal, and the chthonic. The quality of spiritus mundi, that is, a realm, collective unconscious or unifying intelligence that links all of us across the space time continuum where creative energy is accessed, seems to be at play in these works of art as well as my own.
When I think of precursors, I think primarily in terms of not those artists who came before me but rather those artists that influenced my mind in my childhood and adolescence. From my list above, most artists listed are technically my precursors. However, some of those artists did not come into my awareness until adulthood. So here is a list of the 9 precursor artists:
William Blake
Salvador Dalí
Nick Bantock
Matta
Marc Chagall
Ernst Haeckel
Hieronymus Bosch
Wassily Kandinsky
Edward Gorey
Pablo Picasso
Out of all these artists, Picasso’s work is the most influential and inspiring. For several decades of my life, I tried going to as many Picasso exhibits as I could. Picasso’s level of productivity and various periods/styles of his work are what resonate the most with me. His work also opened the door to Salvador Dalí, and Dalí's work exposed me to Matta, Chagall, and Kandinsky. Meanwhile, PBS’s long running Mystery series opened the door to Gorey’s work. The album Aion by Dead Can Dance introduced me to Bosch through the album cover in 1990. I found Bantock's Griffin & Sabine series at a local bookstore in Stowe, Vermont decades ago, inspiring me to follow suit in creating digital epistolary artwork and stories.
Chagall and Blake are who I would consider “soulmate” artists, meaning that their artwork speaks to me on a spiritually romantic level that offers unconscious glimpses into my relationship with Hans long before I was even aware of Hans. As I look at their artwork now, it is so apparent to me how their paintings could come to symbolize the romantic love between a human and otherworldly being. Prior to knowing of Hans’s presence, their artwork offered a symbolic representation of true love. How could I have ever known back then that sometimes love knows no bounds between heaven and earth and that one’s true love/soulmate could be existing in another dimension?
Out of all these artists, William Blake’s work is the most synchronous and emotionally triggering because many of his drawings/paintings of men physically resemble Hans when he had been alive. His Lucifer/Satan series from The Divine Comedy, in particular, are like the psychical doppelgängers of Hans and the man he’d ultimately become during World War II. Many of his enemies during the war likened him to Lucifer for his uncanny ability to seemingly appear from nowhere and annihilate his opponents during aerial combat. Hans’s locks of blond hair and large blue eyes relegated him to the heights of the mythological hero, while his supernatural ruthlessness in the air turned him into an alluring beast, lurking in the darkest corners of fairy tales.
Examining this list of artists has further confirmed that the dead can offer indirect forms of communication through music, art, and other forms of synchronous events. Sometimes, like in my case, deciphering the codes that arrive long after the initial contact through a specific tool (e.g. a work of art). Some have referred to this as an angel’s whisper–the inaudible voices that work with our intuition to curiously and inexplicably guide us toward an event, a place, or object that feels incomprehensibly meaningful–that weirdly tugs at our emotions. We don’t know why we feel forlorn or nostalgic for this thing that curiously offers a sense of familiarity and comfort.
It is in this way, these artists viscerally have spoken to me since childhood through the ethereal tendrils of my ghostly lover gently reaching out. My longing is Hans's own, and our love is further activated through images that stand as signposts of a union that, like the artwork, is surreal, abstract, and magical.
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