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26/09/2011 : Jersey City, NJ, Liberty State Park: Empty Sky (New Jersey September 11th Memorial) (Jessica Jamoz, Frederic Schwartz, 2011)
Artista QUIM Alcantara
Mural (acrílica sobre parede)
250 x 350 cm
outubro de 2009
Permalink: quim.com.br/mural-coqueiro-consultorio-mais-saude
D843_013
08/04/2017 : Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, Château La Coste : exposition Mountains and Seas (Ai Weiwei)
All Fingers Must Point Down
"*!\SERIOUSLY/!*EXCEED The "Courage" Of Your Restrictions. Your Own Inner Light Alone Is The Only KEY. Shine Through, Shine oN. Early Adopter, Late Bloomer--DON'T Let THIS NAO PASS Into Never SAW What It Came To MEAN...That You Completely SEE..."--Wyatt Matturs--(OneStrokeArtWater) MRI (MysteryRepeatsItself) The World's First Bowhammer Cymbalom CD "Radically Repurposed" For Surreal Form, Spectral Figure, & Haunted Face-Lift From 'Flared' Bodies Of Water (Sea, Lake, Creek, Puddle) StillorMoving
MAIN GALLERY CURATION IN PROGRESS (From Thousands)
Meyer's description of the creative process behind Adam and Eve and Friends. Full story found at www.jennycutlerlopez.com
Javier Sicilia the 56 year old Mexican poet, journalist and activist who launched a grassroots movement with aims to end the ‘War on Drugs’ after his 24 year old son was murdered by a drug cartel, has been interviewed by Connor Guy and Umar Farooq for The Nation magazine. Sicilia states “Cartels have a lot of bosses. We are talking now about fifteen cartels [in Mexico]. And they have multiplied since President Calderón’s [2006 military] strategy to make war on them. …A path to peace is to change the national security law to a human law for peace. And the allowance of regulated drug use, because its not a national security issue, it's a public health issue, and attacking drug abuse is causing a tremendous harm to the country. …The US has forbidden drug use, which should be a public health issue. And then they set up for us this war. Over $2 billion have been invested in this war [on drugs]—mostly for guns, for weapons and military intelligence. …if we can get support from the media, we would be able to put this on the politicians’ agendas, because it’s a problem in the US and Mexico. It’s a bi-national problem. Not only that, it is a continental problem, and if we are really serious, it is a world problem.” Inspired by The Nation ow.ly/bJ8I6 image source Twitter ow.ly/bJ8Gb
LIfe Through the Glass by Charlotte Hughes-Martin
Residency:
Corbett Hospital
Stourbridge
Maker: Charlotte Hughes-Martin
The Stourbridge residency took place at the Corbett
Hospital, named after the original benefactor William
Corbett, the glass manufacturer. Glass artist Charlotte
Hughes-Martin collected family memories of the local
glass industry from visitors to the hospital and then
engraved them onto glass objects which they could take
away. She and Robyn Smith also taught engraving skills
to members of the public.
Making Moves, Creating Futures for Craft
Making Moves is a West Midlands craft development initiative
involving four regional partnerships, led by Staffordshire County
Council and Craftspace, a Birmingham based craft development
organisation. The project consisted of nine craft residencies
which took place in community settings between September
2011 and July 2012, culminating in a touring exhibition.
The nine makers were challenged by residencies in unusual
workspaces - including a hospital, a pub and a park visitor
centre - which acted as sources of inspiration to develop ideas
for new work. They worked with local communities, offering
making workshops that were high quality, inspirational and in
some cases, life-changing. The exhibition showcases new work
by the makers in response to their residency setting, as well
examples of tools, materials and work created in the community
sessions.
The project also provided opportunities for nine crafts graduates
who supported the community making sessions as well as
receiving mentoring from the resident maker. They were given a
small bursary towards the development of their practice and
have also created new work for the exhibition.
Making Moves aimed to provide valuable opportunities for
learning. Makers gave masterclasses and lectures to Higher
and Further education institutions as well as talks to the wider
community. They wrote about the residency experiences on a
project blog, as well as coming together for regular networking
sessions.
To find out more about the project visit www.makingmoves.org and the
Makers’ Residency Blog www.makingmoves.posterous.com
Photos by Becky Matthews
Jean Cocteau was the kind of man who treated reality as if it were a hotel lobby: pleasant enough, but not somewhere you'd want to spend the night. Some people make paintings. Some people write poems. Cocteau seemed to wake up each morning wondering how many art forms he could inconvenience before lunch.
There's an old rule that if you do too many things, history won't know where to shelve you. Cocteau answered by setting fire to the library. He drew with the confidence of someone signing a check on another bank. He wrote novels that dreamed they were mirrors. He made films where statues breathed, mirrors liquefied, and death behaved less like an ending than a maître d' showing guests to another table. Today we'd call it multimedia. Back then it was simply refusing to stand still long enough for critics to pin a label on him. The twentieth century loved artists who suffered publicly. Cocteau preferred immaculate suits. That alone made people suspicious.
Modern art often survives by persuading you that confusion is depth. It erects a monument to ambiguity, hires a publicist, and invoices the taxpayer. Cocteau played a different game. He understood that mystery is not the same thing as obscurity. A magician who spends twenty minutes explaining that his trick cannot be understood is probably hiding empty sleeves. That's the difference between enchantment and institutional prestige.
Cocteau knew style was not decoration; it was velocity. A line drawing by him arrives before you've finished looking at it. It doesn't ask permission from theory. It doesn't require a curator to translate it into sociology. It either lives or it doesn't. Today, that confidence can seem almost offensive. Somewhere along the road, art criticism decided that beauty was naïve, craftsmanship was suspect, and intention mattered less than political utility. The artwork became an excuse for the wall text. If the explanation is better than the object, you've entered the museum gift shop of ideas. Cocteau would have smiled at that. Not because he rejected intellect. Quite the opposite. He distrusted the bureaucracy of interpretation. He knew symbols should travel light. Once they require committee approval, they stop being symbols and become paperwork. His collaborations tell their own story. Give him dancers, composers, actors, aristocrats, boxers, addicts, saints, opportunists—he found use for everyone. The twentieth century often looked like a masquerade. Cocteau understood the masks better than the faces. Maybe that's why his work still feels strangely alive. It doesn't explain itself. It seduces, disappears around a corner, leaves a cigarette burning in an ashtray, and expects you to follow. There's something almost unfashionable about that now.
We live in an age that demands artists provide user manuals. State your position. Announce your moral credentials. Declare your trauma. Publish your methodology. Include references. Cocteau simply handed you a key and pointed toward a mirror. Whether you walked through it was your responsibility. That's a dangerous proposition. Not politically dangerous. Imaginatively dangerous. Because imagination can't be audited. And perhaps that's why Jean Cocteau remains difficult to classify. He wasn't building a movement. He wasn't manufacturing theory. He wasn't auditioning for sainthood. He was making beautiful traps—objects designed to catch the moment when certainty slips and wonder sneaks in through the side door.
Some artists leave masterpieces. Cocteau left a passport.
ink, watercolor on paper
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
Well now, settle back in, because today we celebrate a mixed up story. Jean Genet. He didn’t just come out of nowhere, he came out of orphanages, reform schools, prison yards, and borrowed rooms where the wallpaper knew more secrets than the neighbors ever would. France tried to erase him early on, but Genet took that erasure and turned it into ink. He wrote like a man carving his name into a cell wall, slow and deliberate, knowing the guards would read it later. He had a way of crowning the uncrowned. Thieves, traitors, hustlers, sailors leaning on the rail at dawn, Genet looked at them and saw ceremony. Not the kind with flags and brass bands, but the kind that happens when two people recognize each other in the dark. His novels and plays don’t clean anyone up. They make dirt sacred, make shame glow. That’s why they still feel dangerous. Genet didn’t want justice; he wanted intensity. He wanted to go all the way to the edge and lean out just far enough to describe the view.
Somewhere along the road, Genet crossed paths with Alberto Giacometti, another man obsessed with the human figure, but for different reasons. Genet wrote The Studio of Alberto Giacometti like it was a love letter slipped under a locked door. He didn’t talk about sculpture the way art critics do, measuring angles and influences. He talked about Giacometti the way you talk about a man you’ve watched wrestle with ghosts. Those long, thin figures, Genet saw them as survivors, scraped down to their essence, like prisoners who’ve lost everything except the fact that they’re still standing. In Giacometti’s studio, Genet found a mirror of his own work. Both men were stripping life to the bone, refusing decoration, refusing lies. Genet said Giacometti wasn’t trying to make people beautiful he was trying to make them real. A body reduced until it could no longer pretend. That’s Genet all over. Whether he’s writing about a murderer, a lover, or a statue frozen in dust and light, he’s asking the same question: what’s left when you take everything else away?
So when you read Genet, or stand in front of a Giacometti figure, don’t expect comfort. Expect recognition. Expect that quiet moment when you realize the distance between saint and criminal, flesh and spirit, art and life, it’s thinner than you were told.
Now, we can’t pass through this tell without mentioning the poems, the ones that made polite society reach for the volume knob and twist it hard to the right.
Genet’s poems are soaked in sex the way a back alley is soaked in rain and cigarette smoke. Sex for him wasn’t decoration, and it sure wasn’t romance-card stuff. It was power, danger, worship, humiliation, glory, all tangled together like bodies in the dark where you can’t quite tell whose hand is whose. These poems don’t flirt. They stare you down. They say: this is what desire looks like when it refuses to behave. A lot of poets use sex as metaphor. Genet used metaphor as sex. Every touch, every look, every act becomes a ritual, almost religious. And that’s the real scandal, not the flesh, but the holiness. He wrote erotic poems the way medieval monks wrote about God, except Genet’s God wore boots, smelled of sweat, and might rob you blind before morning. In his lines, lust isn’t the opposite of purity; it is purity, stripped of excuses. You’ve got to remember the time he was writing in, too. To write openly as a gay man, to center desire that society had already labeled criminal, was itself an act of rebellion. Genet didn’t argue for acceptance. He didn’t ask for tolerance. He doubled down. He made outlaw desire ceremonial, almost royal. In these poems, the body becomes a flag raised in enemy territory.
There’s also tenderness there, even when it’s buried under provocation. A kind of aching devotion. Genet knew that sex exposes people faster than confession ever could. In those moments, masks fall off, hierarchies wobble, and the truth slips out. That’s what he was after, not shock for shock’s sake, but revelation. The moment when desire tells you who you really are, and maybe who you can’t escape being. So if those poems make you uncomfortable, that’s part of the program. Genet believed discomfort was honest. He’d probably say if you’re blushing, you’re paying attention.
—
Le Condamné à Mort
SUR MON COU sans armure et sans haine, mon cou
Que ma main plus légère et grave qu'une veuve
Effleure sous mon col, sans que ton cour s'émeuve, Laisse tes dents poser leur sourire de loup
O viens mon beau soleil, ô viens ma nuit d'Espagne, Arrive dans mes yeux qui seront morts demain.
Arrive, ouvre ma porte, apporte-moi ta main,
Mène-moi loin d'ici battre notre campagne.
Le ciel peut s'éveiller, les étoiles fleurir,
Ni les fleurs soupirer, et de prés l'herbe noire
Accueillir la rosée où le matin va boire,
Le clocher peut sonner : moi seul je vais mourir.
O viens mon ciel de rose, ô ma corbeille blonde!
Visite dans sa nuit ton condamné à mort.
Arrache-toi la chair, tue, escalade, mords,
Mais viens! Pose ta joue contre ma tête ronde.
Nous n'avions pas fini de nous parler d'amour.
Nous n'avions pas fini de fumer nos gitanes.
On peut se demander pourquoi les Cours condamnent
Un assassin si beau qu'il fair pâlir le jour.
Amour viens sur ma bouche! Amour ouvre tes portes!
Traverse les couloirs, descends, marche léger,
Vole dans l'escalier plus souple qu'un berger,
Plus soutenu par l'air qu'un vol de feuilles mortes.
O traverse les murs; s'il le faut marche au bord
Des toits, des océans; couvre-toi de lumière,
Use de la menace, use de la prière,
Mais viens, ô ma frégate, une heure avant ma mort.
//Jean Genet, 1942
—
LET YOUR TEETH sink their wolfish grin
Into my tender and defenseless neck whose back
My hand lighter and more solemn than a widow
Strokes under my collar without your heart being moved.
O come my handsome sun,
O come my Spanish night,
Come into my eyes that will be dead tomorrow.
Come, open my door, give me your hand,
Lead me far from here to wander our countryside.
Let the sky awaken, the stars blossom,
Let the flowers sigh, the bells sound,
And the black grass greet the dew that morning will drink
In the fields: as for me I'm going to die.
O come my rosy sky,
O come my blond basket!
Come visit in his night your man sentenced to death.
Rip your flesh, kill, climb, bite,
But come! Come put your cheek against my round head.
We hadn't finished speaking of love
We hadn't even finished smoking our cigarettes.
It's a wonder how the courts could sentence
A murderer so fair that he makes day grow pale.
Love, come to my mouth! Love, open your door!
Walk through the halls, come down, walk softly,
Fly down the stairs, more agile than a shepherd,
Sustained in the air better than a flight of dead leaves.
O go through the walls; if need be, walk along the edge
Of the roofs, of oceans; cover yourself with light,
Use threats, use prayer,
But come, O my frigate, one hour before my death.
//Jean Genet, 1942
ink, watercolor on paper
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
By Naoki Enyo - photoshop / made for Trinity Graves , owner CEO of Avante Modeling Agency : The Avante Vision ....* FASHION to the EXTREME above and beyond the normal... pushing the limits of BEAUTY in SL *
A Glitch "Moira’s Fatae (Μοῖραι) ~ Ètude I”
This art piece were created for my PhD and based on a Digital and Analog Aesthetic Research on "Artistic Practices, Digital Art in Social Networks and Net Art", some digital techniques used of artistic diversity, such as the re-mixed appropriation of image or video, also work conceived as original data work called creative altered binary code, datamoshing, generative art and glitch art worked in all its forms and expressions; works of art with a strong focus decoding the i-frames of images and videos (also known as key frames and altered or distorted creative binary code) mixed with seductive techniques of Pixelsorting Art; making it seem extremely sensitive and abstract; created exclusively for the virtual gallery on-line.
by ™℗®© Louis M o n t i e l
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#visualartists #glitchart #glitch #glitché #pixelsorting #glitchartistscollective #glitchvideo #datamosh #digitalglitch #videoglitch #hyperspektiv #minimalart #videoart #dfkt #pixelsorter #artistsvisual #glitchartoninstagram #glitchartscollective #glitcharts #glitchartistcommunity #glitchartwork #error #glitchartists #glitchartcommunity #glitchartistcollective #glitchartist #pixelsortingart #proceduralart #creativecodeart #glitchportrait
Portrait Andreas B. Vornehm: Autor, Betreiber des des Kreativbüros für Texte und visuelle Kommunikation "MINI-KASHUGI", Grafik-/Webdesigner, Herausgeber des Berlin Kurzgeschichtenheftes "Storyatella"
©crazyneopop All Rights Reserved. This image is not available for use on websites, blogs or other media without explicit written permission
© crazyneopop Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Dieses Bild ist nicht für den Einsatz auf Websites, Blogs oder anderen Medien ohne ausdrückliche schriftliche Zusage
Spanish painter Pablo Piccasso, surrounded by artworks, at his villa La Californie in Cannes in 1955.
A Glitch "Niqab (κερί) ~ Ètude V”
This art piece were created for my PhD and based on a Digital and Analog Aesthetic Research on "Artistic Practices, Digital Art in Social Networks and Net Art", some digital techniques used of artistic diversity, such as the re-mixed appropriation of image or video, also work conceived as original data work called creative altered binary code, datamoshing, generative art and glitch art worked in all its forms and expressions; works of art with a strong focus decoding the i-frames of images and videos (also known as key frames and altered or distorted creative binary code) mixed with seductive techniques of Pixelsorting Art; making it seem extremely sensitive and abstract; created exclusively for the virtual gallery on-line.
by ™℗®© Louis M o n t i e l
~ FOLLOW ME & SUBSCRIBE ~
Instagram ~ louismontielt
Facebook ~ Louis Montiel
YouTube ~ Louis M o n t i e l
Vimeo ~ Louis M o n t i e l
#visualartists #glitchart #glitch #glitché #pixelsorting #glitchartistscollective #glitchvideo #datamosh #digitalglitch #videoglitch #hyperspektiv #minimalart #videoart #dfkt #pixelsorter #artistsvisual #glitchartoninstagram #glitchartscollective #glitcharts #glitchartistcommunity #glitchartwork #glitchartisdead #glitchartists #glitchartcommunity #glitchartistcollective #glitchartist #pixelsortingart #proceduralart #creativecodeart #glitchportrait
Installation shot from the exhibition "Ectopia" @ Rogaland Kunstsenter. Curated by Geir Haraldseth. jan 29 - march 1.
OSWA (OneStrokeWaterArt) w/ Uniquely Re-Purposed Optic Playback "Brush" MRI (MysteryRepeatsItself)--The World's First 'Bowhammer' Cymbalom CD On A Selfie-Stick For San Francisco BayFlare Pareidolia (SciFi, Alien, Surreal, Mythic & Celestial Faces, Figures & Abstract Form-Streams--(Real-TimeSpace Existence Duration: Less Than A Second--Cloud-Uploaded? Quasi-Permanent 'Posterity'--From Anchored Raft--L-Hand Lifting "Sumthin' In The Water Brought-To Light, R-Hand SnapShot
MAIN GALLERY CURATION IN PROGRESS (From Thousands)
- The Stubborn Art of Falling -
A skateboard is often mistaken for a toy because people confuse seriousness with solemnity. They see four wheels, scraped shoes, loose clothing, and conclude that what unfolds on the pavement is entertainment. What they fail to notice is the discipline hidden beneath repetition, the education contained in failure, and the philosophy embedded in persistence.
Skateboarding is an argument against immediacy. Every trick is built upon a history of unsuccessful attempts, bruised knees, split palms, and the quiet decision to stand up once more. There is no shortcut that can replace the countless hours spent negotiating gravity. The body learns what pride refuses to admit: mastery is nothing more than failure refined through patience. Each fall strips away the illusion of talent as a gift and reveals it as a construction assembled through stubbornness. This stubbornness is frequently misunderstood. It is mistaken for recklessness when, in reality, it is resilience. The skateboarder returns to the same ledge, the same stair set, the same crack in the concrete with an almost irrational determination. Yet this persistence is neither obsession nor vanity. It is an act of dialogue between desire and limitation. The obstacle does not yield because one wishes it to; it yields because one has transformed oneself enough to overcome it.
The city itself acquires another meaning in the presence of skateboarders. An empty square is simply architecture until someone decides to move through it with imagination. A handrail ceases to be merely functional; a curb becomes a possibility; a neglected plaza becomes a meeting place. Skateboarding reclaims public space not through ownership but through use. It reminds us that cities are not museums to be admired from a distance but living environments that only fulfill their purpose when inhabited.
Where skateboarders gather, something remarkable often occurs. Places that appeared abandoned begin to pulse with conversation, music, sound, laughter, mutual encouragement, and constant movement. Parents become less hesitant to cross the square. Passersby linger instead of rushing through. The simple presence of people engaged in a shared activity produces a form of informal guardianship that no surveillance camera can imitate. A populated public space discourages isolation and neglect. It becomes more difficult for fear to settle where life insists on remaining.
The skate spot is, therefore, more than a location for tricks. It is a social contract without signatures. Experienced riders celebrate the successes of beginners because every landed trick recalls a hundred forgotten failures. Advice is exchanged freely, applause follows persistence as much as achievement, and respect is earned through commitment rather than status. The community understands that every skilled skateboarder was once the person repeatedly picking themselves up from the ground. Perhaps this is why skateboarding resists easy commodification. Its value cannot be measured by medals or financial success alone. It resides in a slower transformation: the shaping of character through repeated confrontation with difficulty, the cultivation of courage without spectacle, and the insistence that public spaces belong to those willing to inhabit them responsibly and creatively.
The marks left by skateboard wheels on concrete are often dismissed as damage. Yet the deeper imprint is invisible. It is found in the confidence of someone who has learned that falling is not humiliation but instruction; in friendships forged through shared persistence; and in urban spaces rescued from emptiness by the simple decision to gather. A city without people is only infrastructure. A city where skateboarders practice, fail, encourage one another, and return the next day becomes something else entirely: evidence that public life is sustained not by concrete, but by those stubborn enough to fill it with movement.
Well now, here’s a little story for the all-day travelers, the dashboard drummers, the coffee-cup philosophers, and the people driving nowhere special beneath a moon or a sun that looks like it’s been up too long. Today we celebrate a kid from Los Angeles named Ritchie Valens. Oh yes, Ritchie Valens.
Now that’s not the name he was born with. Sounds like a movie star who kisses dames in alleyways while saxophones play somewhere upstairs. No. He came into the world as Richard Valenzuela, and like a lot of people, he sanded the edges off his name so it could fit easier into jukeboxes and radio introductions. The music industry has full of names shortened for the convenience of neon signs.
He was seventeen years old. Yes. Seventeen. At seventeen most people are still deciding whether they want to be cowboys, poets, mechanics, or fugitives. But this kid already had one foot in eternity and the other on a Fender guitar.
You know, rock and roll in those days was like finding electricity in the barn. Nobody knew what to do with it. It jumped fences. It scared the church people. It made your parents stare at you like you’d joined a traveling circus. And out there in California, with the airplane factories humming and the highways stretching like black rivers through orange groves, this Mexican-American kid plugged into that current.
And then came “La Bamba.” Now “La Bamba” wasn’t born in Hollywood. That song had dust on its boots long before radio got ahold of it. Folk music always travels farther than the people who own it. It crossed oceans, crossed languages, crossed kitchen tables. And Ritchie Valens took that old Veracruz folk tune and shot it into outer space on a backbeat. That record sounds young. Not immature, but young. There’s a difference. Young like chrome on a ‘58 Chevy. Young like the first Friday night after school lets out for summer. Young like somebody believing the world’s actually gonna keep its promises.
And then there was “Donna.” Not “La Bamba,” not the wild dance halls and the spinning hips and all that teenage electricity. No, “Donna” was something else entirely. A slow song. A lonely song. The kind that sits beside you after everybody else has gone.
Donna sounded like winter lights through a lonely cafe. Just a kid singing about a girl he couldn’t quite hold onto, stretching her name out like it might keep her from disappearing. And my father, well, every time he played that song, he’d change the words. Not Donna. Loana.
Oooh Loana Oooh Loana…
My name drifting through the speaker instead.
Like fathers sometimes do, quietly rewriting the world so it belongs a little more to the people they love. And for a few minutes, that old song from the fifties stopped belonging to the vinyl player and teenagers in letterman jackets. It belonged to our kitchen, our car rides, our family. That’s what songs do. They travel through strangers until they become personal. Until one day you realize somebody has stitched your own name into the melody.
Ritchie Valens’ voice had that hopeful urgency. Like he knew the clock was moving faster for him than for everybody else.
You ever notice how some singers sound like they’re singing from the middle of their lives, and others sound like they’re singing from the edge of a cliff? Ritchie sounded like the second kind.
Then came that winter tour. The buses were breaking down. Musicians freezing in the Midwest. Coins rattling in pockets. Bad food. Worse roads. The whole sad carnival of American music rolling through snowstorms trying to make enough money to stay alive another week. And somewhere in Iowa, they flipped a coin for a seat on a little airplane.
A coin toss. That’s the kind of thing fate likes. Fate doesn’t usually come through the front door. It slips in through tiny decisions. A quarter spinning in the air. And suddenly the kid was gone.
Along with Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper, lost in that frozen dark over a field that didn’t know it was about to become part of American mythology. People later called it “The Day the Music Died.” But music never dies. That’s the whole point. The people leave. The songs stay leaning against the wall waiting for the next lonely person to need them.
And somewhere today, somebody’s hearing “La Bamba” for the first time. Maybe at a wedding. Maybe from a passing car. Maybe through a kitchen radio with bad reception. And they don’t know they’re listening to a seventeen-year-old kid who never got to grow old enough to hear the legend people made out of him.
Funny thing about rock and roll — sometimes the shortest echoes last the longest.
watercolor, ink on paper
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
A charity project through Bridge Communities; 'A Chair Affair' was an event where artists were sponsored to create a work of art using chairs as the vehicle, which were then showcased in retail shops in the Western Suburbs of Chicago. These works then went up to auction where 100% of the proceeds went to families and individuals in need. Bridge Communities strives to help those in need and aim to help people get their lives back on track. This was my second 'A Chair Affair', my first one taking place in Naperville in 2014.
Today we celebrate paint. Paint and light. Paint and coffee cups sitting crooked on checked tablecloths while the seasons leans against the windowpanes like an old debt collector. And if you’re going to talk about paint in Scandinavia, sooner or later you’re going to wind up at the doorstep of Carl Larsson.
Carl Larsson wasn’t one of those painters who wanted to drag you into storms or shipwrecks or scenes where Caesar’s getting stabbed under a red curtain. No. Larsson painted something more dangerous. Domestic happiness. And that’s a risky business. Anybody can paint tragedy. Tragedy practically paints itself. But joy? Real joy? The kind where the sunlight falls across the kitchen floor and your kids are half-dressed and somebody’s burning porridge in the next room? That takes precision.
Larsson came out of Stockholm in the nineteenth century, poor as a stray dog under a freight train. Europe was changing fast then. Smoke stacks rising up everywhere, people trading forests for factories, old gods getting pushed aside by clocks and ledgers. But Larsson found this little corner of the world up in Sundborn with his wife Karin, who was an artist herself, and together they built a dream out of painted wood, woven rugs, pale blue walls, and winter light.
You look at a Larsson painting and you can almost hear the floorboards creak. The rooms breathe. Kids tumble through the pictures like loose harmonies in a gospel tune. There’s always a chair pulled out somewhere, like somebody just left the room to answer the door. And the colors, mmm… those reds and whites and green, they don’t shout at you. They hum. Like an old fiddle played low after midnight.
Now some people think nostalgia is weakness. But Larsson understood something. Home isn’t sentimental. Home is rebellion. In a world racing toward noise and iron and profit, he painted breakfasts. Gardens. Socks drying near the stove. He said: this matters too. And Karin, now there’s the secret chord in the song. Without Karin Larsson, you don’t get the whole melody. She designed textiles, interiors, clothes, furniture. Half the beauty people call “Carl Larsson” was really the rhythm the two of them made together. Like Johnny Cash without June Carter, still powerful maybe, but missing the second heartbeat.
People today look at those paintings and see Scandinavian coziness. Candles. Simplicity. A little cinnamon bun civilization. But underneath all that calm there’s a radical idea: that ordinary life can be sacred. That the table where your family sits might be as worthy of art as kings on horseback. That’s a dangerous thought in any century.
So today, while the life gathers outside and the coffee goes cold beside the open book, think about Carl Larsson. A man who painted not the world as it was breaking apart, but the world as it could still be held together.
ink, watercolor on paper
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com