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Surrealism famous for stimulating creativity

By Stephen Gibb | Published: 06/03/2020

Surrealism Famous For Stimulating Creativity

surrealism famous for its creative energy

Vengeful Wrath of the Chocolate Gods — 36″ x 24″, oil on panel


Creativity sometimes just comes to you and you can only surmise in hindsight as to the possible origins. Where does a cherry-chocolate god figure come from? It’s funny, bizarre, and unexpected but may be more logical than you think.

The vengeful god in the clouds is nothing new and most often is used in pop culture for humourous effect. It’s really an absurd notion—an angry god? So what could be more absurd than a god of chocolate? In ancient times (maybe even today) there were beliefs that sustained polytheism where a multitude of gods each have distinct functions—the god of the sea, the god of fire, the god of love. Why not a god of chocolate? I love chocolate and why shouldn’t it have its own deity lording over the domain of chocolate land.

The rest of the painting is just silly aspects of chocolate experiencing their chocolate reality—living, dying, being consumed and generally enjoying their chocolatyness.

This got me thinking about the creative process and how some simple prompt can lead you into depths unexplored. People often ask me where my ideas come from and through my grinding teeth I try to answer cordially. Thoughts, that’s all they are. Thoughts that get turned into images and recorded in oil paint—endless thoughts swirling all around you waiting to be plucked and converted into something wonderful.

Brian Eno had a system of cards called the Oblique Strategy cards he formulated with Peter Schmidt that essentially were simple thoughts or instructions designed to help promote creativity. I had been collecting a series of thoughts and when I discovered Eno’s cards, realized I was doing the same thing.

Although they could be construed as motivational in tone, if they are accessed during a point of creative stagnation, they may jump-start the creativity process back into high gear.

Here are my creativity-booster phrases. Pick one at random. Think of them as instructions to open your creative block — or Hallmark Cards from the Twilight Zone:

Surrealism Famous For Stimulating Creativity

Strip away the pre-supposed dignity of art

Celebrate the genius of the audience

Disrupt the universe in your own special way

Art is a veil of obfuscation hiding a prize

Rattle your mental cage and awaken the sleeping philosopher within

Defy the gravity of consciousness

Make art to be photographed and studied later

Challenge yourself with something counter-intuitive

Meditate on you idiosyncrasies

Hold the colour in your mind’s eye

Release yourself of fear by trapping it in your art

Look at clichés from different angles

Revisit a repressed thought

Contemplate the perspective of the art viewing the audience

Mine your soul for a gem to share

Loose yourself in the math of composition

Take the most obvious solution and do the opposite

Bask in the glow of the viewer’s confusion

Consider the chemistry of the brain

Hide something in plain sight

Portray the human side of evil

Invent your own dichotomy

Redirect in response to the last thing you created

Reach through the curtain of time and touch your younger self on the shoulder

Label an emotion that does not yet exist

Let the viewer know that you are watching

Make the art self-aware

Engineer tension

Set traps on the way to the most obvious conclusion

Derail a preconception

Expose a subtle notion with flamboyance

Direct attention to absurdity

Conceal a secret within the content

Distil the uncanny essence of ugliness

Pose a question and leave it hanging

Shine the light on an open-ended conclusion

Fearlessly diminish the precious

Invert the sacred and profane

Investigate a theme that terrifies you

Mock yourself

Listen closely to music that irritates you

Construct 10 answers to the question “Why?”

Let something random dictate direction

Abandon your gimmick

Create as if you are an abstractionist—if you are an abstractionist try surrealism

Look at the pure joy of futility

A childhood game is waiting to be rediscovered

Consider two outcomes and flip a coin

Make an imperfection a focal point

Share a memory of extreme profundity

Dare to confront your inner fool

Invent your own version of reality

Travel one second back in time

Stretch the rules just to the breaking point and let go

Try on a point of view in conflict with your own

Ask yourself a question and don’t answer back

Reduce your complexity to cave-dweller basics

View yourself from 100 years in the future

Sum up your process to a phantom biographer

Tell yourself it doesn’t really matter and is not that important

Let a ghost direct your hand

Contradict your present state of mind

Plan on taking one step forward and two steps back

Ponder the noise and listen for a message

Reflect on all the people you have encountered

Recall an idea you forgot that you forgot about


Surrealism Famous For Stimulating Creativity

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Surrealism Famous For Stimulating Creativity

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Surrealism
シュルレアリスム


Vengeful Wrath of the Chocolate Gods

A painting also known as Surrealism and Chocolate

Pop Surrealism of Stephen Gibb

Humorous look at the kingdom of chocolate.

    Artist: Stephen Gibb, oil on wood panel, 2020


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Surrealism and Happiness – Do they go together?

By Stephen Gibb | Published: 27/01/2020

Surrealism has many faces with Canadian artist Stephen Gibb

“Happy!” — Stephen Gibb, 36″ x 24″, oil on panel, 2020

The idea behind this painting was to portray sheer joy and happiness sloughing off the evil and darkness of the world like a snake sheds its skin. However, I wanted to depict the happiness in an artificial surrounding (fake trees, fake clouds, fake graphic sunburst) to suggest that sometimes happiness is an illusion. Contrasting the cartoon aspects with more realistic depictions of trees and clouds (at the edges) was my way of acknowledging the very real presence of darkness and evil in people’s lives. Part of the challenge of the painting was to attempt to have the happy face in full illumination and push everything else into a more subdued shadow.


HAPPY!

A painting also known as Surrealism of Despair

Pop Surrealism by Stephen Gibb

This painting examines the fragile interface between happiness and despair. Taking a symbolic perspective of happiness and sloughing off the skin of sadness and evil the landscape reflects the mood of the central image. Through the lens of surrealism, the result is a contrast between light and dark, both physically and psychologically.

    Artist: Stephen Gibb, oil on wood panel, 2020


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Biography
Stephen Gibb is a Canadian artist and works in the small town of Amherstburg, in southern Ontario, and maintains a second studio in Windsor. He has a B.F.A. in visual arts from the University of Windsor and is currently represented by the St. Germain gallery in Toronto. His brand of Canadian Pop Surrealism is collected around the globe and has gained widening interest since working on the album art for hip hop artist Trippie Redd.

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pop surrealism painting

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Surrealism painting addresses PC absurdities

By Stephen Gibb | Published: 24/01/2020

Surrealism painting *

“Keeping it Together, Walking on Eggshells” — Surrealism painting by Stephen Gibb, 36″ x 24″, oil on panel, 2019

I imagine a world where the visually rich language of fairy tales and nursery rhymes extends into adulthood. The traditional nature of this kind storytelling is best presented with visual aids; simple, straightforward text accompanied by fantastic illustrations. In our culture, this is a conventional part of our collective upbringing and experience. These stories often convey lessons, which are coded in familiar, symbolic language, and are likely where we first encounter metaphor and allegory.

We carry these symbolic codes into adulthood—like wolf equals bad, pig equals good. The narratives I deliver in my Surrealism painting utilize this common trove of visual references; however with more mature and timely messages.

•••
surrealism painting by Stephen Gibb

Keeping it Together, Walking on Eggshells” — Stephen Gibb, 36″ x 24″, oil on panel, 2019

In a world where we have to mind our Ps and Qs, more and more, the notion of political correctness inspired this very literal translation of walking on eggshells (being careful to not offend or do something wrong).

My little monkey on the left is fast-tracking his evolution with some human juice but is he prepared for the balancing act of being human—trying to keep it all together, physically and mentally. Confused, disoriented and without caution the human trundles onward, with no way back and no way to retrace his steps, he navigates the perilous landscape.

I laugh at the Sun in headgear, the egg protecting himself with an eggbeater and the pylon on the precipice. Sometimes the humour just presents itself and I can’t resist. I find that dollops of levity can balance out the serious nature of some of the messages.

The traveller walks in confusion, barely holding his liquefying head from rupture unaware of the solution (the single combination lock) that hovers within reach. All around the landscape crumbles and the very thing that sustains him (bread) self immolates in a futile attempt to mark his passing and leave a trail to return on. Of course the crow and his foreboding symbolism, eats the crumbs to obliterate the path of return.

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See article in Surrealism Today

* Surrealism painting is a dumb term that I would not normally use but may help a search engine land you on this posting.

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Surreal art and the pervasive nature of phobias

By Stephen Gibb | Published: 23/01/2020

Surreal art and Phobias

While pondering a fun house setting for a painting, I became aware that the whole reason for a fun house is to artificially induce fear in the patron. It became clear that fear or phobias would then become the central theme to the painting. Taking a smattering of common phobias and integrating them into my surreal art, here is the result:

surreal art of Fun House

“Fun House of Phobias” — Stephen Gibb, 36″ x 24″, oil on panel 2019

Meditation on how fear shapes our lives

Fear fills us with anxiety.
It makes us avoid situations and it can make us seek out situations.
It forces us to overpay for things we don’t need.
It urges us buy cheap knockoffs.
It suffocates us in our inadequacies.
It erodes our status and drives our aspirations.
It ruins relationships and drowns us in paranoia.
It stokes the fires of jealousy.
It keeps us guarded and incapable of contact.
It waits for us at night.
It hides at the bus stop, dark alley, and foreboding basement.
It lurks behind the strangers face.
It slinks in the shadows of the unknown.
It watches us as we sleep.
It shows us what is wrong with the world.
It crushes us with what we see in ourselves.
It contaminates every uncertainty.
It rationalizes our irrationality.
It confuses our affirmations.
It makes us doubt the truth.
It dumbs us down and puffs us up.
It lies out loud and inside our heads.
It guides our thoughts and haunts our dreams.
It disrupts the peace with blunt force.
It looms like a dark cloud above us.
It screams on the dark pier of surreal art.
It is chronic and unrelenting.
It removes our calm and unsettles the waters.
It hints at the onset of madness.
It overthrows the balance.
It leads us to the edge.
It threatens us with doom.
It grips us like the icy hands of death.

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Surrealism Art: A peeling label on an empty container

By Stephen Gibb | Published: 20/01/2020

Surreal. Surrealist. Surrealism art (whatever that is…?).

Words that follow me around like wilful shadows, playfully darting about in the periphery of my mind’s eye. Until something better comes along I guess I will reluctantly tolerate them (even if “surrealism art” makes me grind my teeth). I won’t let them define me but I will let them rattle around in their container until they can somehow break free.

To me, labels like this are like subtle haunts. Lurking just at the perimeter of thought’s reach, within the range of off-stage prompts and directions, barely at the threshold of awareness. More like faded scar tissue than an emblazoned crest worn proudly, labels and brands are like familiar clichés. They convey a message in basic, familiar terms but may not be very accurate. Yet what is their impact? Does the label beget the art?

I often wonder about people whose work becomes bigger than themselves and if their “brand” then, in turn, informs their decisions. Or does the creator deny the influence of past success (or suppress it) to the point where the delusion is that we are not co-dependant of our previous creations. I don’t know, but sometimes I think about things like this.

Every once in a while I take on a project that just seems like an exercise in biting off more than I can chew. It’s a way of testing the walls of my container or maybe redefining the limits.

Pop Surrealism art by Stephen Gibb

“The Empty Visual Discourse of a Reluctant Pop Surrealist” — Stephen Gibb, 42″ x 48″, oil on panel, 2019


With the painting “The Empty Visual Discourse of a Reluctant Pop Surrealist” 42″ x 48″, oil on panel, 2019, I attempted one of the largest painting I’ve ever done while stuffing it with content relevant to the themes of consumerism and emptiness. Originally conceived as a “proposed” painting for an exhibit (which I was consequently rejected from) it continues a commentary so prevalent in my body of work that it could almost be regarded as an “exemplary” Stephen Gibb painting.

Starting with the underlying, hidden decay at the top, which is concealed by the artifice of the commercial world of marketing, advertising and product, the painting illustrates the “consumer” in a feeding frenzy, consuming the last drops of what is available to him. Like some kind of fantastical digestive tract we follow the course of the consumption into the hollow container below, where motifs of “emptiness” echo the nature of the unfulfilling consumer/marketer contract—the unsatisfying delivery of what was promised.

Just as a label promises a certain expectation it can often under-deliver. The final irony being that my painting under-delivered to the curator of the exhibit, and was thus rejected. Funny how life imitates art…

I’m an artist not a writer, so feast on the art and let me eat my words.

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Surreal artist performs alchemy

By Stephen Gibb | Published: 19/11/2019

How does a surreal artist deal with the theme of “magic”?

Crossing the lines between the supernatural, the unexplained and the realm of science that is just “weird” offers up a rich visual spectrum of possibilities for a painting.

surreal artist vision of magic

Spooky Action at Close Proximity — Stephen Gibb, 36″ x 24″, oil on panel, 2019

Taking straight-forward connections to magic words like magic 8-ball, magic mushroom, magic carpet, magic eye (vacuum tube), and combining them with tools of magicians and alchemists becomes a jumbled image of loosely associated items and characters.

Items like a tarot card, crystal ball, evil eye, ouroboros, an infinity symbol, gold, lead (pencil), cups, sword (dagger), coin, wand and voodoo doll all add to the mystical symbols that historically are linked to the performing of magic.

The coloured balls represent the four elements—earth, air, fire, water, while the left-hand-side hand represents black magic and the right white magic.

Science as magic is represented by Einstein’s theory of relativity, as he watches the baby traversing the sky in an arch, arriving as a corpse on the opposite side. Instead of a rabbit coming out of the hat we have a pair of rabbit-ears (TV antenna) which echoes the technology represented by the cathode tube, the egg-yolk light bulb and electric arc.

Is a surreal artist supposed to access their unfiltered subconscious or can their work be informed by content and concepts pulled from language and assembled in a compelling composition? Andre Breton would argue in favour of the former. I will defend my preference for the latter and let my painting act as support to my argument. Whatever side of the surreal fence you find yourself on, it all boils down to your own personal preference and willingness to accept that good things come in all sorts of packages.

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Pop Surrealism and Lowbrow

By Stephen Gibb | Published: 27/09/2019

Pop Surrealism and Lowbrow

Pop Surrealism has a broad range of influences, a reverence for art history, an unsettling presence and a wicked sense of humour. One thing that unites the pop surrealist community is their comfortable and insatiable relationship with weirdness. If describing in words what is and what isn’t pop surrealism, one only has to look at the work to get the distinction.

To me, pop surrealism and lowbrow are just labels that I fit easily into. It’s a category that helps you describe my work to someone else, and to locate it or discover it Online. Chances are you are reading this right now because of some connection the “movement”. At any rate, you are here, so take a minute to plunge deeper into my world…

pop surrealism and lowbrow
Can You Pass The Marshmallow Test?
In this painting I explore themes that relate to psychology. If you have a working knowledge of some of experimental psychology’s fundamentals, you probably have a good idea what’s going on here. There are effigies of Freud and Skinner, as well as references to Rorschach, Pavlov and other classic research experiments. Plus a few little random things I wanted to add.


pop surrealism and lowbrow painting
Head Trip to the Uncanny Valley of the Shadow
This painting began as an exploration of “the journey” or “the trip” and because of the connotations took on some drug references as well. Aside from the planes, trains and automobiles and the drug paraphernalia, there is the flaming skull, which I imagine is the hell of addiction. The so-called “loss of ego” is symbolized by the crown floating away, while the desperate lizard (lizard brain) tries to stay with it.


pop surrealism and lowbrow painting
Give Me A Break
Taking idioms of the word “break” and incorporating them into visual symbols was the thought behind this painting. Break the bank, heart broken, break the spell, etc. Though this may have been the motivation and the roots of the composition, my mind took it in many different directions as well.


pop surrealism depicting happiness and despair Happy! — Stephen Gibb, 36″ x 24″, oil on panel, 2020


surrealism depicting chocolate god Vengeful Wrath of the Chocolate Gods — Stephen Gibb 36″ x 24″, oil on panel


For more Pop Surrealism and Lowbrow fun try SurrealismToday

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Posted in Canadian art, Canadian Artist, Canadian painter, Canadian Pop Surrealism, Canadian Surrealism, contemporary art, contemporary artist, crazy art, lowbrow, lowbrow pop surrealism, Pop Art, Pop Surrealism Lowbrow, Stephen Gibb, stephen gibb artist, surreal, Surrealism, surrealism art, surrealism famous | Tagged bubblegum surrealism, canadian pop surrealism, canadian surrealism, pop surrealism, stephen gibb, surrealism | Comments closed

Lowbrow pop surrealism

By Stephen Gibb | Published: 13/08/2019
lowbrow pop surrealism painting of money idioms by Stephen Gibb

“There Are Fake Diamonds In My Shit” , Stephen Gibb, 36″ x 24″, oil on panel, 2019

Lowbrow pop surrealism

…just what exactly is this mishmash of cultural references and art keywords. Well, that pretty much says it all. To reach the audience who wants to delve into the realm of lowbrow pop surrealism, you have to be able to tickle the algorithms and register within the criteria of online search queries. Using the right keywords that lead to content that hopefully fits the intentions of the searcher, the web can direct you to familiar paths or blindside you with unexpected discovery.

That’s what I am tying to do with this post. No one ever labeled their artwork as “lowbrow pop surrealism” but the two blended genres have lived side by side for so long now they have almost become synonymous.
And how else will you discover my painting “There Are Fake Diamonds In My Shit” without a little Internet magic?

Now to break it down…

Definition of lowbrow : of, relating to, or suitable for a person with little taste or intellectual interest .
Well that’s a little blunt. From an artistic perspective here’s what Wikipedia has to say about “lowbrow art”: Lowbrow, or lowbrow art, describes an underground visual art movement that arose in the Los Angeles, California, area in the late 1970s. It is a populist art movement with its cultural roots in underground comix, punk music, tiki culture, and hot-rod cultures of the street.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowbrow_(art_movement)

Ok, to me, this even seems a little too specific and maybe even a little exclusive. For one thing it failed to mention the ubiquitous prevalence of “Margaret Keane-style” knock-off girls with big dewy eyes and blank expressions. And, yes, maybe I could square peg myself into the round hole of “underground comix” (my sketches do look a little like Robert Crumb drawings) but let’s just say there are many artist like me who have taken lowbrow sensibilities and run with them in their own directions.

And now we come to surrealism.
Definition of surrealism: a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature, which sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.

Wait, what? Irrational? Are you trying to say my paintings are irrational? Unconscious? I don’t even believe in the unconscious mind, except the autonomic nervous system that keeps me alive while I’m thinking of something else or sleeping. Damn, I just forgot to breathe for a second there…

Oh shit, I guess I didn’t read the entire Wikipedia definition of lowbrow….”It is also often known by the name pop surrealism. Lowbrow art often has a sense of humor – sometimes the humor is gleeful, sometimes impish, and sometimes it is a sarcastic comment.”

BINGO!

BTW humor is spelled H-U-M-O-U-R…

Which leads us the painting in question. “There Are Fake Diamonds In My Shit” is essentially a commentary on commerce, using idioms of money and extending my obsessive commentary on consumerism to a nauseating degree of blather.
Since we consume we must excrete and as consumers there is always waste (the black cloud of smoke, the shit). The predominate figure of the “fool and his money” has a giant $-shaped colon on his back. The colon is consuming “bread” (colloquial term for money) and is shitting on money (dirty money). Money is also “burning a hole in his pocket”. There is money laundering; money is the root of all evil, blood money, moneybag, money pit, money growing on a tree and money to burn. Rounding things out are the cabbage, anther term for money and Ben Franklin, the figure on a US $100 bill.

I need to mention lowbrow pop surrealism one more time to boost the keyword frequency.
And now you know how and why you ended up here.

lowbrow pop surrealism Circus of Delusion

“Circus of Delusion”—Stephen Gibb, 36″ x 24″, 2020

lowbrow pop surrealism party scene

Don’t Poop On My Party!—Stephen Gibb, 324″ x 24″, oil on panel, 2020

lowbrow pop surrealism painting

The Sacred and Profane—Stephen Gibb, 36″ x 24″, oil on panel, 2020

If someone discovers my art based on a “crazy art” query, so be it. I can be the “crazy artist”.

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Posted in Canadian Artist, Canadian Pop Surrealism Art, Canadian Surrealism, contemporary artist, lowbrow, lowbrow pop surrealism, pop surrealism art, Pop Surrealism Lowbrow, Stephen Gibb, stephen gibb artist, Surrealism | Tagged canadian lowbrow, lowbrow, lowbrow pop surrealism, money, pop surrealism | Comments closed

Crazy art, surrealism or metarealism?

By Stephen Gibb | Published: 16/04/2019
crazy art depicting rotten apples, Man Ray, take idioms

Man Ray Bears Witness to a Culture of Take, Take, Take — Stephen Gibb, 36″ x 24″, oil on panel, 2019

It’s all crazy art, isn’t it?

What is “crazy art” aside from a naïve label, probably bestowed by a sincere art outsider? It is forgivable when “crazy art” is used as the layman’s password into the realm of exploration¬—like initiating a web search. Hopefully this kind of low target search may lead them to a deeper understanding and a more refined vocabulary.

Art is constantly indexed, and categorized with labels like “crazy art” and isms that satisfy our need to group things into referential bins. We stack them, ready for retrieval from our reference warehouse, ordered in a way that best suits knee-jerk access at the opportune moment. Often times the broad categorization bundles loosely-associated things into a catch-all taxonomy, so labels like “surrealism” come to encompass anything that’s a little off kilter. In this case, there is no service done to the 20th century art movement that Andre Breton cemented into art history with the likes of Dali, Magritte and Ernst. The intellectual foundations of the movement are marginalized by the convenience of describing something out-of-the-ordinary as “surreal”.

Just as it is important to differentiate that hail and a hurricane are not merely weather, but very distinct types of weather, it is important to identify that different art fits its definition with some accuracy.

I understand that the impulse to cast my crazy art as a surrealism is more accurate than to label me an expressionist but in some ways it’s like defining a species by its phylum. Other labels like “lowbrow” and “pop surrealism” have gained traction to some degree but miss the mark as well. Lowbrow usually pertains to a naïve, self-taught kind of art making that tends to side on the primitive spectrum of things. Pop surrealism, for the life of me, has taken on an affinity for portraits of child-like waifs with big, Margaret Keane-style eyes. Cute, but I don’t want to be part of that.

My problem with the surrealism label is largely due to my disassociation with Freudian psychology. Whereas the authentic surrealists held/hold Freud in high esteem and revelled in the unencumbered subconscious to inform their art, I allow a very conscious and deliberate mind to direct my work. The so called metarealists seem to adhere more to this deliberate kind of thinking but their own definition is as elusive and abstract as post modernism was to us in the 80s.

Someone once described my work as “bubblegum” surrealism, which I’m sure was meant as a slight insult but was ironically appropriate. Like the Bubblegum pop music of the 60s and early 70s, which took popular forms of music with an edge, like psychedelic and garage, and distilled them into palatable, marketable and more benign forms, I too soften my edges.

In some ways I have made my art more benign by introducing nursery rhyme characters and children’s-book characters into it, along with my saturated candy-colour palate. Using the characters as conventional symbols pulled from our common, western heritage, they come pre-loaded with meaning and act as comforting interlocutors for the viewer, drawing them deeper into the unusual settings.

Maybe the labeling should be left to the experts, the critics, the commentators and journalists. If my crazy art has any merit or integrity to warrant that kind of distinction—where someone deems it worthy of branding with an identifying label—then maybe that’s the true test of the art’s power on others.

Then again, nothing but thick, jaded skin will defend us from things like “engineered demand” and hollow marketing messages. The hype-machines will continue to spew out brands and labels, fighting for the last ounce of our scattered attention.

If someone discovers my art based on a “crazy art” query, so be it. I can be the “crazy artist”.

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Posted in Canadian art, Canadian Artist, Canadian painter, Canadian Surrealism, crazy art, metarealism, Pop Surrealism Lowbrow, Stephen Gibb, stephen gibb artist, Surrealism | Tagged canadian art, canadian artist, canadian pop surrealism, canadian surrealism, painter, pop surrealism, stephen gibb, surrealism | Comments closed

Contemporary Art and the Death of Contemplation

By Stephen Gibb | Published: 14/03/2019

Contemporary art has been hit hard by our inability to focus, meditate or even take five minutes alone with a painting.

With my painting Death of Contemplation, the title comes from my lament for a time before incessant distraction. When you could fall into a deep, thoughtful meditation and slowly mull over an idea until it blossomed into something wonderful. The tranquility and quietening of the mind was like being submerged in a peaceful lucid dream, relaxing and thrilling at the same time. As a contemporary artist and painter, I relish those moments.

contemporary art depicting death idioms

Death of Contemplation, Stephen Gibb, 36″ x 24″, oil on panel, 2019

The content of the painting however takes on a more dark turn. Based on idioms of death the “characters” associations and literal depictions of phrases relating to death create a macabre jumble of imagery. Not exactly your typical contemporary art.

On the far left a microphone records no sound in its emblematic expression of dead air. Next to it a dead end sign grows fruit with some already dead on the vine. At the head of the coffin rests a dead eye, contextually out of place from its normal nautical setting, it echoes a death’s head expression with empty eye sockets and mouth agape. The severed hand holds the black 8s and Aces of the dead man’s hand. Above the dead jelly man Humpty Dumpty whips a dead horse, locked in a dead heat with a living horse. The death’s head door is as dead as the doornail hammered into it and below a pair of dead man’s shoes sits abandoned. The Dodo is not quite as dead as a dodo, but soon will be with the thirteen coils of the hangman’s noose ready for action. Behind the dodo is a spectre of the undead, looming in the darkness. In the sky a symbolic representation of Hypnos (personification of sleep) flies by the moon while mirrored on the opposite side is the Hypnos’ twin brother Thanatos, represented by the inverted torch symbol and the Greek personification of death. Last is the sickle mounted on the wall, which occasionally substitutes for the scythe—the weapon held by the Grim Reaper…Mr. Death himself.

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Posted in Canadian art, Canadian Artist, Canadian painter, Canadian Surrealism, contemporary art, contemporary artist, Pop Art, Pop Surrealism Lowbrow, Stephen Gibb, stephen gibb artist, Surrealism | Tagged Canadian contemporary art, canadian pop surrealism, contemporary, contemporary art, pop surrealism, stephen gibb | Comments closed
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