The Art of Alexander Jansson

Alexander Jansson’s DeviantArt website: http://enigma-astralis.deviantart.com/

Alexander Jansson’s website: http://www.alexanderjansson.com/index.html

The Dark Photography of Annie Bertram

Visit Annie Bertram’s website: http://www.darkview.de/

The Cute and Creepy Art of Mizna Wada

A lover of horror comics from her childhood, Mizna Wada was born in 1974 in Kumamoto, Japan. Mizna currently resides in Tokyo.

• Visit Mizna's website here: http://www.hihou.net/mizna/index.html
• Buy her stationary at Dark Horse Comics

Artist Anne Bachelier - Capturer of Dreams

Anne Bachelier is a Surrealist painter, printmaker, ballet designer and illustrator. She was born in 1949 in Louvigne du Desert, France. Each of her canvases draw you into her captured dream worlds full of devils, angels and other worldly beings. Metamorphosis, transition, and evolution provide the common threads of the art of Anne Bachelier. Her metaphysical, dream-like fantasies evoke feelings simultaneously powerful, peaceful, and protective. 

Bachelier studied art formally from 1966 to 1969 at the École des Beaux-Arts, La Seyne-sur-Mer, before serving an apprenticeship at an engraving shop in Valence from 1974 to 1975. Since 1989, she has been exhibited frequently throughout France and on both coasts of the United States. Bachelier is a wife, mother of three and has three grandchildren. She lives and works near Grenoble, France.

Anne has also illustrated several books including: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Phantom of the Opera and Rose Daughter: A Re-telling of Beauty and the Beast.

Links:

Visit Anne Bachelier's Blog (in French)

Anne Bachelier at CFM Gallery

Artist Review - Ray Caesar

art by Ray Caesar

Ray Caesar is a 3D digital artist. Although his works are created in the same way movies like Shrek are – his works look more like strange and wonderful oil paintings of bygone eras (from Georgian to Victorian to the 1950s). That is one thing that sets this artist a part from others. - you can't tell how his art is made. He not only creates beautifully creepy other-wordly scenes that look like paintings but he actually creates mini worlds with hidden secrets in them that only he knows. For instance, the furniture in the scenes has drawers and inside those drawers are secret objects that the viewer is not always given permission to see. And underneath the beautiful dresses that adorn his characters, are stitches and scars and anatomically correct bits.

If you were to read his biography on his website you will find that he, as he says 'much to his parent's surprise' was born a dog in London on October 26th 1958. His family later moved to Canada where he still lives. He went to art school and had various jobs such as (and in his own words) 'designing horrible buildings in architectural studios, working in medical art facilities, digital service bureaus, suspicious casino computer game companies, eventually working at computer modeling, digital animation and visual effects for television and film.'

The job that haunts his subconcious and influences his art and life though -  was working in a children's hospital. For 17 years he did various jobs for the hospital such as 'working in the photographic department that documented such things as child abuse, surgical reconstruction, all manner of abnormalities in children and how they progress as they grow, he drew medical drawings of dogs and sheep in animal research facilities in the research center and over the many years worked with all the strange and unusual things one finds in such a place. One day he might have been working on an animation of the cryogenic removal of a tumor… another day he would have helped build a board game for a brain damaged child to asses the severity.' It is evident in his work how deeply this period in his life has affected him. Most of his works are of children often wearing bat or cat costumes and with over-sized heads and strange appendages. He says about the worlds that he creates, that he is creating a safe haven for these souls and their appendages and objects that come with them are a part of who these souls are. They are divine child-like creatures and their appendages are sort of like badges of honour like angel's wings that are there to protect them.

I think it is also interesting to note that Ray is a spiritual person who says that he has conversations with his deceased mother, sister and others. He has also had precognitive dreams and has had out of body experiences. Here is a recount of one of his experiences: ' When I was a child there was a lady who sat on a chair in the corner of my room. I never saw her come and go but she was often there when I was frightened or worried. She was kind and told me soft stories of things that are difficult to remember. I think she was always doing something with her hands like embroidery. My parents and family never spoke of her and sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and she would still be sitting there in the dark. I think I would like to meet her again one day when I am very very old and had enough of this world.'

                             

Ray Caesar's Website             

Ray Caesar on Myspace  

Ray Caesar on Facebook 

Ray Caesar's Blog

Artist Review - Elizabeth Mcgrath

Photo of Elizabeth McGrath and her art

Elizabeth McGrath is a sculptor, painter and a singer who was born in Hollywood, California. Her work is classified as Pop Surrealism.

She was raised a Catholic by very religious parents – her mom wanted to be a nun and her father wanted to be a priest. But of course she wasn't the little angel mummy and daddy had hoped for – she was a typical rebelious teenager who considered herself 'Punk Rock'. She was kicked out of seventh grade. On her thirteenth birthday her parents told her that they were going to take her to a wild animal park but instead dropped her off at a southern Baptist home for girls. She has this to say about it:

' It was horrible. We drive up to this gate and it opens. My parents are telling me, “We’re just gonna get directions. We’re lost.” As they’re driving up, the gate slams shut behind us with barbed wire. Then I see these Christian weirdos coming. I went crazy and wouldn’t get out of the car. They finally dragged me out and locked me in the “G.R.” room -- the “Get Right With God” room. It was a little closet with religious tapes playing outside the door. It was hell. They said, “You’re here for a year.” I thought, “I’ll escape. They can’t hold me here.” But they could. It broke my spirits, but then again I was a bad kid. So, I don’t know what I would’ve been like had I not gone there.'

In an other interview she says that she was always getting into situations where she would have to do a lot of community service. She was sent to complete her community service with her dad who worked in the LA county morgue. She spent a lot of time in this morgue putting toe tags on people and filling out reports on how they died. Here is a bit about that in her own words:

'One of the jobs was just filing reports on how people died. I wasn't supposed to read the files, but of course I did. It was mostly pretty boring, but there were interesting things. After doing it for one summer, I started a tally on gang-related deaths vs. other weird deaths. Like, "they got shot, and they had spaghetti for dinner." Most of them were gang-related, but out of every 20 boxes of files, one box would have the interesting files. Weird stuff that happened: weird murders or body parts found or something, and half of those would be suicides. By doing this, I figured out that a lot of women committed suicide in their mid-to-late thirties or early forties. They all had cats and left suicide notes. Most of the men were in their late forties, and most of them did it in their garages, by hanging or shooting themselves.'

Elizabeth says she always dabbled in creative things but didn't do much art in her teenage years as she was busy playing in punk bands. She started out doing menus for her aunt's restaurant and flyers for her punk bands. Then she had a friend who worked at a printing company called Kinkos and she and her friend decided to create a magazine about bands that they liked, because they felt like the bands that everyone they knew liked were being ignored by the media.

Elizabeth had no formal art school training but did go to school for a year for fashion design. From there she started working for Trashy Lingerie in LA where she would get all sorts of weird requests to make anything from dolls, to fairy wings to giant surfing santas. It was there that she made a toy called 'The Junior Meth lab' which looked like a science kit but had crack pipes and things in it.

Her art, presumably the dolls and things that she made at Trashy Lingerie, got noticed by an animation director named Fred Stuhr who did a lot of the ealry Tool videos. He hired Elizabeth to do work on some videos and animation. She worked for Fred Stuhr Animation Studios and then another studio. She says ' I never really dreamt of doing anything in the artistic world until I started working on videos. That sparked all kinds of creative ideas for me. I couldn't stop.'

The work she is now known for are sculptures. She brings to life some very strange creatures that are inspired by religion, consumer culture, urban life, music videos, Edward Gorey, The Victorian Era and nature. They often look like taxidermy animals that are given tattoos and clothing. One of her works is a dear's head on a wall with tattoos and power lines for antlers.

Elizabeth McGrath's Website                                                        

Youtube Interview 1

Youtube interview that shows her making her art

Elizabeth Mcgrath's Myspace page
Elizabeth McGrath's Facebook page
Elizabeth McGrath on Wikipedia
Elizabeth McGrath interview by Tastes Like Chicken
Elizabeth McGrath interview by White Hot Magazine
Bloodbath the Movie - a documentary about Elizabeth McGrath