jasinskiart:

Melody for the Primordial

Music is the most abstract of the arts. It rides an unfiltered highway straight to the center of our emotional selves; no language to process, no visual representation to decipher. For this reason music can be more impactful than any other creative art.

Print available.

Again, on the note of the painter of my last two posts, here is an example of someone who actually has something interesting to say in his artwork. I love Jasinski and own one of his prints, actually (also on the theme of music and composing).

Unlike some artists who choose doughnuts as their dialectical image (http://ericjoyner.com/), you see here that Jasinski is interested in trying to represent something much more interesting, I think, than gratuitous, uninspired, even, dare I write it, boring combinations of whatever (although you might say Joyner’s art was interesting enough for me to write a series of blog posts about it).

Just look at the way the mechanical dragonflies (itself an interesting choice, but one I’m not wanting to explore at the moment beyond paying lip service to their metamorphic life cycles) are in many ways contributing to the production of the artist’s “melody for the primordial.” At first they seem to represent distraction and nuisance in contrast to the serene audience of flowers. Then one looks more closely. One robot-dragonfly looks like it’s guiding the artist’s right hand’s movements, while another seems to be perched on his shoulder where, close to his ear, its buzzing blends and becomes indistinct with the sound of the violin. So mechanical humming ends up contributing both to how the music is produced but also to how the listener experiences it. 

Quite a depiction of the Romantic artist-genius, by the way, coming out of the mire like the flowers (Monet and water lillies, anyone?), playing a violin, hunched over with some great toil or just pure concentration. It’s ridiculing certain 19-century-inspired conceptions of who artists are. The glasses (more technology): are they rose-colored? And strapped to his head, too. But more importantly, the work of art is literally staring at the viewer via the man’s gaze.

And his hair! How reflective! Do you see how his skin also sort of camouflages him against the background? I wonder if this painting’s focused not on the man—because it isn’t, he and the background are more similar to each other than is first perceivable—but rather on the dragonflies, the lilies, and the violin. Look how crisp and distinct the line and colors are with those three pieces, and tell me that those three parts of the picture don’t stand in isolation against the wash of the man’s body, the pool, and the background. For instant fun, compare the way Jasinski’s brand of surrealism addresses the perceived opposition between organic and artificial with the ways that that dialogue has been painted in the past, especially cf. the Art Nouveau movement’s privileging of youth and “natural.”

Aaron Jasinski tumbls here:

http://jasinskiart.tumblr.com/