#everyday i'm ridden with visions

[noctilin]

Oh my gosh aaa youre one of my favorite artists !! Theres so much life and vibrancy to your works it still makes me feel so warm inside after all these years and I want the same kind of vibe to my works. May I ask where you get tend your ideas from..? I'm having such a hard time thinking of fun concepts for my own favorite pairings and you have all sorts of ideas that inspire me so much!! ;;-;; Youre so good with fluff!!

THANK YOU FOR YOUR KIND WORDS!! being a romantic fluff fanartist is very easy in only a few steps! ^_^

find a ship you like

let it possess you and become an obsessed little freak about it

???? (this is you blacking out and not recalling anything else in your life)

congrats the ship's controlling and dictating everything in your life like it's remy from ratatouille and you're linguini

[thunderboltfire]

I have a lot of complicated feelings when it comes to what Neflix has done with the Witcher, but my probably least favourite is the line of argumentation that originated during shitstorms related to the first and second season that I was unlucky to witness.

It boils down to "Netflix's reinterpretation and vision is valid, because the Witcher books are not written to be slavic. The overwhelming Slavic aestetic is CDPR's interpretation, and the setting in the original books is universally European, as there are references to Arthurian mythos and celtic languages" And I'm not sure where this argument originated and whether it's parroting Sapkowski's own words or a common stance of people who haven't considered the underlying themes of the books series. Because while it's true that there are a lot of western european influences in the Witcher, it's still Central/Eastern European to the bone, and at its core, the lack of understanding of this topic is what makes the Netflix series inauthentic in my eyes.

The slavicness of the Witcher goes deeper than the aestetics, mannerisms, vodka and sour cucumbers. Deeper than Zoltan wrapping his sword with leopard pelt, like he was a hussar. Deeper than the Redanian queen Hedvig and her white eagle on the red field.

What Witcher is actually about? It's a story about destiny, sure. It's a sword-and-sorcery style, antiheroic deconstruction of a fairy tale, too, and it's a weird mix of many culture's influences.

But it's also a story about mundane evil and mundane good. If You think about most dark, gritty problems the world of Witcher faces, it's xenophobia and discrimination, insularism and superstition. Deep-seated fear of the unknown, the powerlessness of common people in the face of danger, war, poverty and hunger. It's what makes people spit over their left shoulder when they see a witcher, it's what makes them distrust their neighbor, clinging to anything they deem safe and known. It's their misfortune and pent-up anger that make them seek scapegoats and be mindlessly, mundanely cruel to the ones weaker than themselves.

There are of course evil wizards, complicated conspiracies and crowned heads, yes. But much of the destruction and depravity is rooted in everyday mundane cycle of violence and misery. The worst monsters in the series are not those killed with a silver sword, but with steel. it's hard to explain but it's the same sort of motiveless, mundane evil that still persist in our poorer regions, born out of generations-long poverty and misery. The behaviour of peasants in Witcher, and the distrust towards authority including kings and monarchs didn't come from nowhere.

On the other hand, among those same, desperately poor people, there is always someone who will share their meal with a traveller, who will risk their safety pulling a wounded stranger off the road into safety. Inconditional kindness among inconditional hate. Most of Geralt's friends try to be decent people in the horrible world. This sort of contrasting mentalities in the recently war-ridden world is intimately familiar to Eastern and Cetral Europe.

But it doesn't end here. Nilfgaard is also a uniquely Central/Eastern European threat. It's a combination of the Third Reich in its aestetics and its sense of superiority and the Stalinist USSR with its personality cult, vast territory and huge army, and as such it's instantly recognisable by anybody whose country was unlucky enough to be caught in-between those two forces. Nilfgaard implements total war and looks upon the northerners with contempt, conscripts the conquered people forcibly, denying them the right of their own identity. It may seem familiar and relevant to many opressed people, but it's in its essence the processing of the trauma of the WW2 and subsequent occupation.

My favourite case are the nonhumans, because their treatment is in a sense a reminder of our worst traits and the worst sins in our history - the regional antisemitism and/or xenophobia, violence, local pogroms. But at the very same time, the dilemma of Scoia'Tael, their impossible choice between maintaining their identity, a small semblance of freedom and their survival, them hiding in the forests, even the fact that they are generally deemed bandits, it all touches the very traumatic parts of specifically Polish history, such as January Uprising, Warsaw Uprising, Ghetto Uprising, the underground resistance in WW2 and the subsequent complicated problem of the Cursed Soldiers all at once. They are the 'other' to the general population, but their underlying struggle is also intimately known to us.

The slavic monsters are an aestetic choice, yes, but I think they are also a reflection of our local, private sins. These are our own, insular boogeymen, fears made flesh. They reproduce due to horrors of the war or they are an unprovoked misfortune that descends from nowhere and whose appearance amplifies the local injustices.

I'm not talking about many, many tiny references that exist in the books, these are just the most blatant examples that come to mind. Anyway, the thing is, whether Sapkowski has intended it or not, Witcher is slavic and it's Polish because it contains social commentary. Many aspects of its worldbuilding reflect our traumas and our national sins. It's not exclusively Polish in its influences and philosophical motifs of course, but it's obvious it doesn't exist in a vacuum.

And it seems to me that the inherently Eastern European aspects of Witcher are what was immediately rewritten in the series. It seems to me that the subtler underlying conflicts were reshaped to be centered around servitude, class and gender disparity, and Nilfgaard is more of a fanatic terrorist state than an imposing, totalitarian empire. A lot of complexity seems to be abandoned in lieu of usual high-fantasy wordbuilding. It's especially weird to me because it was completely unnecessary. The Witcher books didn't need to be adjusted to speak about relevant problems - they already did it! The problem of acceptance and discrimination is a very prevalent theme throughout the story! They are many strong female characters too, and they are well written. Honestly I don't know if I should find it insulting towards their viewers that they thought it won't be understood as it was and has to be somehow reshaped to fit the american perpective, because the current problems are very much discussed in there and Sapkowski is not subtle in showing that genocide and discrimination is evil. Heck, anyone who has read the ending knows how tragic it makes the whole story.

It also seems quite disrespectful, because they've basically taken a well-established piece of our domestic literature and popular culture and decided that the social commentary in it is not relevant. It is as if all it referenced was just not important enough and they decided to use it as an opportunity to talk about the problems they consider important. And don't get me wrong, I'm not forcing anyone to write about Central European problems and traumas, I'm just confused that they've taken the piece of art already containing such a perspective on the popular and relevant problem and they just... disregarded it, because it wasn't their exact perspective on said problem.

And I think this homogenisation, maybe even from a certain point of view you could say it's worldview sanitisation is a problem, because it's really ironic, isn't it? To talk about inclusivity in a story which among other problems is about being different, and in the same time to get rid of motifs, themes and references because they are foreign? Because if something presents a different perspective it suddenly is less desirable?

There was a lot of talking about the showrunners travelling to Poland to understand the Witcher's slavic spirit and how to convey it. I don't think they really meant it beyond the most superficial, paper-thin facade.

[antonia-gergely]

Vitamin P - New Perspectives in Painting

Artists I like from the first edition of this book series.

Francis Alÿs

b. 1959 (Antwerp, Belgium)

Best known for Paradox of Praxis I, 1997, where he pushed an ice cube through the streets of Mexico City. Fluxus and the performance art revival of the 1990s comes to mind, but I'd rather focus on his comparatively underrated paintings. 'Francis Alÿs blurs the boundaries between melancholy and humorous story-telling by means of seemingly naive paintings and drawings that form the basis for small animated films addressing socially critical actions and studies relating to everyday life on the streets of his chosen home, Mexico City.' https://www.sammlung-goetz.de/en/exhibitions/francis-alys/

Francis Alÿs, Paradox of Praxis I, 1997 (still)

'Francis Alÿs is best known for his films, installations, and performances called paseos in which he wanders through urban streets. For the past three decades, however, the Mexico City-based, Belgian-born artist has also been quietly painting en plein air, sometimes in extraordinarily remote or conflict-ridden locations. Alÿs completed some of his works when he was embedded in northern Iraq with Kurdish Peshmerga fighters who were driving ISIS out of Mosul.

[Sally] Tallant tells artnet News that Alÿs makes what he calls his “tiny paintings” everywhere he goes, but has never shown them before as an exhibition. Alÿs did, however, include a small preview of this body of work in a powerful video shown in the Iraqi Pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale. Called simply (Untitled, Mosul, Iraq, 31 Oct 2016), it showed the hand of the artist attempting to paint a battle going on around him. Later, he wiped all the pigment away.'

from Artnet in 2018 (https://news.artnet.com/art-world/francis-alys-three-decades-paintings-liverpool-biennial-1245461)

Francis Alÿs, Outskirts of Mosul, 2016

'He consistently directs his distinct poetic and imaginative sensibility towards anthropological and geopolitical concerns centred around observations of, and engagements with, everyday life, which he has described as “a sort of discursive argument composed of episodes, metaphors, or parables”. His multifaceted projects include public actions, installations, video, paintings and drawings.'

'Francis Alÿs presents a selection of postcard-size paintings from the 1980s to today under the title Age Piece. Executed in the tradition of classic plein air painting, these works allude to the condition of global tourism in the contemporary art scene. Many of the paintings were done while scouting new locations for future film projects, often in conflict zones such as Israel and Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq.'

from Liverpool Biennial website (https://www.biennial.com/artists/francis-alys/)

Francis Alÿs, Le Temps du Sommeil. 1996 – present, series of 111 paintings (ongoing). Oil on wood, 11.5cm x 15.5cm

'Accompanied by instructions and postcards which resemble a diary, the work relates in an oblique way to visions of games and exercises seen in many of his actions and films. This series is being shown at IMMA before it travels to Tate Modern, the first stage in an international retrospective of Alÿs’s work.'

IMMA (https://imma.ie/whats-on/francis-alys-le-temps-du-sommeil/)

As I have mentioned, I'm integrating text into my work, and this shows me a very new and bold way to do so. Scrawling, scribbled letters alongside a stamp that would remind anyone who grew up in or before the 2000s of their primary school notebooks or the expiring nature of things like milk sitting in the fridge door. There's something about Alÿs. " My work is a succession of notes and guides. The invention of a language goes together with the invention of a city. "Each of my interventions is another fragment of the story that I am inventing, of the city that I am mapping" quoted in IMMA article.

'Upon entering the room, a seemingly endless sequence of small pieces, alternating between text and paintings, line the walls. The small dimensions require the viewer to approach closely and encourage engagement with the work. Almost all paintings are composed in the same way with a red background and a small, circular setting of olive-coloured grass and a dark green sky where different scenes unfold. Alÿs has compared this technique to the early Renaissance Veduta.  Veduta are detailed paintings or drawings of a town or city where a distant scene was inserted into a landscape.  In later years, however, all artists who employed the Veduta feature were also involved in the painting of Capricci, defined as imaginary scenes, and this would seem an equally appropriate reference for Alÿs’s visions, where figures are repeatedly engaged in seemingly absurd and surreal activities.

While scenes within the green oval are executed with precision, the images also contain splatters of paint and sketchy, white drawings suggesting speedy execution, suited to the  capturing of fleeting thoughts.'

'Rather than serving as an explanatory piece for each painting, the texts accompanying the visual add to our understanding of the narrative. Many of the texts recount journeys undertaken in the past.'

from Paper Visual (https://papervisualart.com/2010/04/20/francis-alys-le-temps-du-sommeilirish-museum-of-modern-art-26-february-23-may-2010/)

I like his visual methods. Very airy, dusty, often warm tones with subtle yet existent brush marks. Representational work, with slight abstracted elements outside of the Veduta feature he alludes to. Magritte comes to mind in his Temps du Sommeil series.