Skip to main content

 Apocalyptic Art


'This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper." T.S Eliot

For centuries, artists and creatives alike have depicted the Apocalypse, which is the fantastical, unimaginable end of the world and all life on it.  At some point it is going to happen, maybe about 5 million years away when the sun burns out, so perhaps it is this truth that has artists thinking of what this end may look like.  Since it will happen, down the track.

Recently it has felt like humanity was in the midst of it with the advent of Covid, but also with the devastation that climate change has been and is inflicting on the land and people globally.  It is very easy to start to think of the end, grim as that may sound.

When I had created yesterday's art piece, even though I wasn't happy with the art work, I was very much intrigued by the colours in the background which reminded me of an apocalyptic feel, vibe.  So today's challenge I set myself the task of creating an art piece that may illustrate that to some extent.

I have to add that the art works are created very quickly and are rough, but what I am liking is the fact that other ideas are able to be generated from these pieces.  Ideas that will develop into more substantiative works.

In this case, Apocalyptic Feel, May 26, 2023. Ink on paper. I wanted to incorporate the warm colours of reds, oranges, pinks, purples and a splash of yellow for the sun.  These powerful colours embody the end, and quite apt too for Climate Change.  I wanted to show the loneliness of such an event, and this is created by having the half destroyed shed on the left hand side of the art work, balanced by the skeleton of a tree on the right hand side.  Both of these are coloured in purple so that a continuity is created between the two.  I hope that the eye can travel from left to right, or right to left and be guided by the colour purple.

The setting is bare and evidently there is no movement, no wind or animals or people.  Desolation.

Is the fascination with the apocalypse in art because it could be a reality with one mutation of a virus, just like that, or a nuclear accident or meteor crashing on earth?  I suspect the frailty and vulnerability of humans is what the artists are really exploring.

Definitely something to further think about and explore.


Stella Grammenos-Dimadis



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

"Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future. "   Corrie Ten Boom Corrie Ten Boom was a Dutch watchmaker, who had helped many Jews escape during the Holocaust, was a prisoner and then a writer.  She held many memories, no doubt, fears; images that would stay forever and haunt her, but they were able to unlock a future for her that she would never have imagined.  Her writing and her boldness initiated her knighthood by the Queen of the Netherlands, The King's College in New York City named a new women's house in her honour, her book "The Hiding Place", was  made into a feature film, twice. Locked away in our computer hard drives are examples of our work and lives that we lock away when our computer sleeps, forgetting about their importance because we are always told to focus on the now, forgetting about our past.  Well, perhaps it is time that we also learn to love our past, regardless of what it was like, so that we can understand what our
Post a Comment
Read more

Writer's block

Writer's block The Writer's responsibility is to his art.  He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one.  He has a dream.  It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it.  He has no peace until then... William Faulkner  Having written films, articles, essays, reports, it has always, at one stage or another, plagued me when I have had writer's block.  That moment when I sit staring at the computer screen as if it is an alien standing it's ground in a duel for battle with me.  Eyeing me, daring me to drop my weapons of my imagination.  The frustration builds up and chocolate beckons, serenading the virtues of itself.  It is all too familiar, this battle, and I may have thrown my writing in all together had it not been for my editor in the late 90's when I completed some articles for Who Weekly. I remember grizzling into the phone line with him that my writing was not perfect...there was something missing...I couldn't pinpoint it...it didn't make
2 comments
Read more
 Nature repeats itself "It never occurs to me that (skulls) have anything to do with death. They are very lively. I have enjoyed them very much in relation to the sky." Georgia O'Keefe In the previous blog, I wrote about the the human form and the importance of it in creativity and art.  Mastering the human form will allow the creator to master other forms in nature. I have some palm trees in the back yard which have surprised me by how high they have become.  They were sold as small trees and now over power my small back area, towering over the trees in suburban Melbourne.  Despite their height, I have enjoyed the changes that they display with each season.  I don't know much about palm trees, but come autumn, they shed some of the old branches and their bark.  Mornings I will wake to find these scattered in my very small yard, did I already say I have a small yard?  You can imagine the space these take.  In any case, recently I found a piece of the bark on the groun
Post a Comment
Read more