beksinski

I find myself returning to the theme of dreams and dreaming. when I come across art that has this quality it arrests my attention and I feel obliged to let it sink in.

for example, my recent post ex oblivione is a republishing of a public domain hp lovecraft story which is a narration that is almost exclusively set in a dreamscape.

the article enter the supersensorium by erik hoel elaborates on some of his work in the field of neuroscience describing the “overfit brain hypothesis”. this line of thinking suggests a function for dreams along with a meaningful way to differentiate art from entertainment. that is, art is that set of inputs which works to loosen our overfit mental models, rather than running in the same grooves. in short, art is mentally challenging to understand.

the redbook by carl jung describes and analyzes his dreams in great detail. jung’s notion of archetypes as emanating from the collective unconscious and manifesting themselves in our dreams is fascinating to consider, even if it is only taken as a metaphor.

today I came across a painter that I must include in this new category of dream-like, reverie inducing… not sure about the right title for this pattern yet.

zdzisław beksiński

born in poland under the communist regime, beksinski produces amazing pieces that I am only beginning to grapple with. I now know this about myself, that it takes me a long time to properly contextualize art that I find compelling. for the moment, I can only try to convey a sense of awe and mystery, with a slight topspin of the phantasmogoric. the physical space and age implied by some of these works immediately recalls my mind to hp lovecraft’s description of the elder gods, or even his use of the term “blasphemous landscapes” in the story “the call of cthulhu” to describe the works produced by painters who were driven mad by dreams forced upon them by the awakening of cthulhu. these images are sourced from an online store that you can buy prints from beksstore.com. go browse the many paintings there. here are but a few that I thought best represented the reverie inducing pattern. they did not come with names, so I gave them descriptions of what seemed meaningful to me.