this is a flavour of post where i have free rein to just wide-eyedly point at things, somewhat like a tantalized-candied baby. i’m calling them “quotidian” posts because they aren’t really meant to be very formal or serious thoughts; more so like “hey this is cool” for a catalogue of things i often think about or am thinking about when writing them.
and one artist that certainly fits the bill and recurrently occupies my mind without fail is zdzisław beksiński. there are wells of inspiration in his paintings. there’s an uneasy quality to them; a sickly-but-homely dystopian fantasy that he embodies in my head, and that not many other artists have really been able to articulate for me.
just wanted to share a few of them and what they’ve inspired in me for things i’m currently working on (or things i may end up eventually working on). not really commenting too deeply on them because i think they speak for themselves, but i’ll talk a bit about why i like them.
untitled (all of his are), but informally called the violinist. i think this may be one of my favorite images for shade-like creatures. this is a subset i’m genuinely fascinated by. the shadow is maybe one of the most ubiquitous elements used in horror throughout history. some adaptations of it have more depth to them than others, but i refuse to accept it as an “overdone” concept. the lack of space, the space between things, and negative space will always be fascinating, and to put it simply, there will always be interesting things to remove in that subgenre of horror creature.
these have inspired me a lot for the sayah creatures in my game fogbound, meant to quite literally be eroded, shady creatures reduced to a repetition of their lives. the violinist is a perfect direct mapping in that regard; a hollow soul reduced to one action.
the yellow hue in his paintings reminds me of a stormy post-apocalypse. it’s kind of dune-y, it’s kind of mad max-y, but it’s also nothing like them at all in the final mood. stormy greys are a favourite of mine in paintings, but this yellow hue captures something liminal that really makes me wish this was a world i could know more about. it’s a much deeper yellow, as if it’s harboring something stranger and the rules of the world aren’t quite the same.
that ties really well into this painting, which i’m going to call longtree, since it reminds me of miss langtree from otgw. this delves a bit more into his environmental surrealism: a tree that stretches out horizontally, as if its fabric was reordered to stretch infinitely out into the void. i think this perfectly encapsulates the often simple inversions that go on to create really cool-looking things in his art. i think about these trees a lot.
this painting covers the last thing i wanted to talk about with respect to his work. these paintings came way before the concept of liminal spaces (though liminality is a concept that’s existed for a long time), but the use of repetition set against this eerily empty and moody space really makes this feel like an incredible piece in that aesthetic. following the aforementioned inversion ideas that i adore, caskets jut vertically out of the ground, with zero covers and skeletons visible to all. these stretch out as far as the eye can see, forming mountains. all of this is overlaid with that same hue of decay and despair.