Visually speaking, the categories of “beautiful” and “challenging” overlap far less frequently than they should. This applies to any creative pursuit: architectural, musical, sartorial, and most definitely when it comes to painting.
Paul Wackers’ work exists in that tiny shared zone between the two categories. His paintings of abstracted machinery, natural growth and mountainous landscapes are as thought-provoking as they are stimulating, mixing recognizable geometric elements with head-scratching piles of…well, interesting-looking stuff.
Wackers’ paintings remind us a little of the psychedelic dreamscapes (nightmarescapes?) of Kirsten Deirup, but there’s no doubt he’s doing something all his own.
Picture a dream you’ve had that wasn’t a straight-up nightmare, but was terrifying. Now place that dream in the context of childhood’s special bewilderment– the type of uneasiness that hooks itself into our pre-adolescent lives like a parasite. I’m talking about weird foods and growling dogs, the uncertain authority of family friends and foreign cartoons swirling about in a sinister haze. Couple all that clammy awkwardness with the distinctly creepy fantasies of the Scandinavian sub-conscious, and you’ve got something close to what The Bun Field is.
Following a young girl through an interior world of rumbling chaos, Amanda Vahamaki’s concise comic book depicts the palpitating psyche of a worried child with breathtakingly naturalistic charm. For pondering all the pernicious phantasms that haunt our heroine’s world, we’re rewarded with flashes of tender humor, like a scene in which the young girl argues with a small bear about which of them is better qualified to operate a vehicle.
Check out a PDF preview of the book here. Oh, and Amazon is currently selling it for $1.94, so you would be foolish not to add a copy to your cart!
Son of a cinematographer and a child therapist, Jan von Holleben must have been destined to create visually striking depictions of childhood fantasy. In his series Dreams of Flying, the photographer takes an old-fashioned approach to staging gravity-defying acrobatics. Hollenben’s work is Gondry-esque (though maybe it’s the “Ghostbusters” shot leaving that impression) in its lo-fi sensibility, favoring D.I.Y. fun over glossy special effects trickery. Check out his latest series, Journey to Everywhere for more adventurous kids, make believe and optical illusions.
At the heart of Sendak’s brilliance is his unforced spontaneousness as a writer. His most epic works: Where the Wild Things Are, In The Night Kitchen, and Outside Over There play out like dreams, discarding the patronizing narrative contrivances of less intuitive children’s literature. But they’re not completely disorganized surrealist romps. Like dreams, they incorporate everyday banal experiences as props and stage dressing in an absurd theatrical puzzle revealing the answer to an unresolved problem from our waking lives.
Haruki Murakami is perhaps the most well-known Japanese author in the West, revered for novels like Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. His informal, subdued musings about life in an alienating globalized society are accented by a unique flair for magical realism– expertly weaving together ruminations on pop songs and healthy living with understated odes to human loneliness and casual asides about telepathic cats, supernaturally irresistible earlobes, and impossibly insidious corporate conspiracies.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is a beautiful, but less popular novel of Murakami’s– perhaps because it amplifies the dualistic nature of his work, taking his pension for juxtaposing fantasy and reality to its logical extreme. Telling two separate but linked stories through alternating chapters, the author switches between the mundane, scientific world of data processing and a chimerical universe with a surplus of unicorns. While the jarring contrast can be off-putting for those unfamiliar with Murakami’s style, Hard-Boiled Wonderland just takes a little patience to reveal a complex, grown-up version of themes familiar from childhood fables. Forging a vivid fantasy on a foundation of the real world’s emotional complexity, Murakami skilfully addresses the significance of dreams and abstraction in our banal, everyday lives under late capitalism.
Paperhouse is a cinematic anomaly: neither purely horror nor child-oriented fantasy, it’s an unnervingly creepy late-80s British film about an artistic mono-afflicted schoolgirl whose imaginary world comes to life. Subtracting the obligatory elements of magical thinking, Paperhouse is simply a movie about a girl who draws a bunch and then falls asleep and has some weird dreams about her drawings. Which is awesome. We need more movies like that. But Paperhouse isn’t mere whimsical mindtrip—it’s an examination of complex childhood emotions, a subtle koan about the delicacy of relationships with parents, friends and figures of authority. Check out a segment from early on in the film, in which our heroine hangs out at an abandoned train station, discussing “snogging” with her classmate, and then unexpectedly enters the internal world that she’s created in her drawings:
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