Vara

Here I am again, writing a blog entry way past my bedtime, apparently the only time I can find time. I’ve just spent the last 3 hours studying for my Western art II test and just had to post about this amazing artist my boyfriend’s friend, Gardner, told me about (which is funny because my textbook for Western art also happens to be the well-known Gardner’s Art Through the Ages).

He saw my art for the first time this weekend(particularly the unfinished painting posted two entries ago) and he was shocked that I had never heard of the Spanish surrealist painter Remidios Vara, and truthfully I’m surprised too. I googled her today and was instantly hooked on all of her work! Her paintings manifest the surrealist style being used in her time by Dali and Kahlo, while also possessing a lot of motifs I see in modern illustration today in artists like Julie Morstad. Also, I must agree with Wikipedia for their comparison of her art with that of Hieronymus Bosch’s, an amazing Dutch painter from the 1400’s. The stylistic resemblence between the two artists is really uncanny especially based on their use of vibrant color, lack of foreshortening, and allegorical style, not to mention how elated I get when I find two artists this similar that lived 500 years apart(what a mystery to me as to their congruencies, so much to learn about the connections of artists through time).

Honestly, when I was looking at her work for the first time each painting seemed to transcend the previous one. Thus, picking only a few to show on here was a surprisingly difficult task, but here are my favorites…preceded by a fishtastic Boooosch closeup.

BOSCH:





VARA: