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mournblade |
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Post subject: A.O. Spare's Art, Realism vs. Myth
 Posted: Aug 14, 2008 - 04:52 AM
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Joined: Aug 12, 2008
Posts: 20
Status: Offline
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I have been looking for years at Spare's renderings of the human figure, a portion of his work that is of particular interest to me. What I see in his early renderings is what people call the "Symbolist Realist," style, where there is a very well-rendered human form with incredible anatomy in the foreground, and then psychological and occult themed symbols in the background.
However, there is a later set of renderings, which I've only found just a handful of, where the rendered form becomes seamless with the mythological portions of the work. As far as I know, there are very few artists who ever tackled both realism, and also symbolism, where the artist avoided a pastiche. I find these images by Spare incredibly shocking and haunting, and I've tried my hand at a few renderings of my own in the style, with very little success.
Another thing that has always struck me about Spare's art, is that almost anyone you show it to immediately thinks "pornography." I do understand that Spare's art contains pornographic material, but I've suggested to people who have had that reaction that there is something else going on in Spare's art. One of the particularly interesting things is that Spare sticks very close to his model's actual attributes, and does not try to turn it into a fetishist kind of art. Many of the women rendered in "The Book of Pleasure" are very beautiful, but they do not have the kind of beauty that attracts most people's eye. Some of the models are downright hideous.
It seems to me that while Spare's work has pornographic elements, what Spare is going for is not to create a "turn-on" but to expose the reality of the figure of his model. Again, in the later renderings, this adherence to realism becomes seamless with the mythical material. In my mind, Spare is every bit the master at anatomy that Michelangelo is, but with a different mental set. He is completely unstudied in major art schools, and I believe this is because of his ability to shock us, not only with reality, but with his incredibly atavistic vision of the world.
Any thoughts? |
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Opposition is strength.
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lashtal |
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Post subject: Re: A.O. Spare's Art, Realism vs. Myth
Posted: Aug 14, 2008 - 07:10 AM
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Site Admin
Joined: Sep 30, 2003
Posts: 2388
Location: Oxford, UK
Status: Offline
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mournblade wrote: › Spare's art... almost anyone you show it to immediately thinks "pornography."
Really? Not in my experience. I'm not sure I know anyone that considers it to be remotely "pornographic", if "pornography" is used in its usual, legal sense as something that is both sexually explicit and designed and intended to "arouse desire".
But, in any case, I fear you are missing Spare's intention at a rather fundamental level. |
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