Visionary Art Exhibition - Zoom Gallery

At our VISIONARY ART EXHIBITION site 

we are happy to announce that we incorporated a new app to zoom images.

ZOOM GALLERY

 

Currently there are only a few examples - but there will be more to follow soon!

I am trying out this new app - the page is under construction. After some tinkering, I came up with the right page design how to best present selections of outstanding art from our members of the private Visionary Art Network. This is in addition to our regular FEATURED ARTWORK: with over 500 member artists there are now (as of today) 13,936 photos uploaded, most of which are artwork, and the majority of it (that has been set for public view) is presented on the artists respective pages in embedded slide-shows at the VISIONARY ART GALLERY, our parent site.

As the network grew from initially a handful of members, it became necessary to spin off a site where we could showcase outstanding individual works as well as present exciting blogs by guest writers from our membership - Dreams & Divinities and Archaic Visions - and also feature important exhibitions and links to associated sites such as The Society for Art of Imagination and the Visionary Art Network Australia (to mention only a few - this category is growing as well). 

Another spin-off website is our VISIONARY ART HALL OF FAME - as it grew it became necessary to present it as a separate site. This site is also under development. It features pioneer artists as well as a selection of historical artists considered important to our community. 

One of my future projects on the drawing board is a remake of our parent site, the Visionary Art Gallery  with an updated template. I am currently trying different test versions. There are problems with migrating features that are unique to the current template, so it will be necessary to adjust and re-design all the individual artist pages and other featured pages one by one. 

INTERNATIONAL SURREALISM NOW

INTERNATIONAL SURREALISM NOW

I had started the category of International Surrealism Now quite some time ago in order to feature the great work my friend Santiago Ribeiro was doing in promoting and organizing shows, ever since the monumental 2010 INTERNATIONAL SURREALIST EXHIBITION at the Bissaya Barreto Foundation in Coimbra, Portugal.

Alas, of late I was not able to follow up on the latest developments since I am increasingly busy with other projects, My last entry was on Friday, October 16, 2015.

I don't abandon my friends, and I would also not want to disappoint readers that had earmarked this category, so I was quite elated when I found that a old mutual friend of ours, the 'Oneiric Realist' Steve Smith and his wife Debbie had picked up the slack and began featuring INTERNATIONAL SURREALISM NOW on their website!

So anyone looking for the latest news under this category, head on over to Steve's site:

click above ▲ to visit the new site

Also exciting: they are just in the process of setting up a magazine:

The Oneiric Realist – Magazine

click above ▲ and check out the announcement of the impending launch!

Thank you Debbie and Steve Smith for picking up the slack!

Steve Smith announced on his Facebook page (June 12th 2016):

The ideas for the magazine " The Oneiric Realist" are flying back and forth between Debbie and me this morning. It feels as if everything I have been working on over the last several years is finally coming together in this magazine project. We're in the early stages but we wanted to get the word out and get some interest from artists who would be interested in submitting their work for the first issue. (The image is a mock-up of the cover concept.)

I will be installing a tab to this magazine on my VISIONARY ART EXHIBITION site!

~o~

IM’AGO PRIMORDIALIS exhibition at Krab Jab Studio, Seattle USA

OPENING SOON !

July 9 – September 3, 2016

Artists’ reception:

July 9, 2016, 6-9 PM

Krab Jab Studio

5628 Airport Way S. Suite 150

Seattle, USA

photos and posters reproduced are courtesy of Don Farrell

Artworks by :
Ernst Fuchs, H.R. Giger,  Brigid Marlin,
 Martina Hoffmann, Robert Venosa,
Peter Gric, Roku Sasaki, Tomasz Alen Kopera,

Steven Kenny, Liba W. Stambollion, Igor Grechanyk, 

Amanda Sage, Autumn Skye Morrison, Susannah Martin, Andrew Gonzalez,

Otto Rapp, Forest Rogers, Jean Pronovost, Miguel Tio, Benjamin Vierling,

Jeff Mihalyo, Don Farrell, Yvette Endrijautzki,

William Fahey and Bryan K. Ward.

Curated by : Don Farrell, in association with Krab Jab Studio

Ernst Fuchs - Frau Lot

“Knowing doesn’t reside in the knower,

nor does truth in what is known,

but in between.”

– “A Mystical Epistemology”, Peter Reason

Mystery has been banished; everything must be defined. And yet, while analytical thought bestows many gifts upon civilization, we remain insatiable. As if the unknown, itself, is the very ferment of community, humility, love….and life.

Embracing mystery as a source of inspiration, Fantastic Realists from around the world present this exhibition of numinous, visionary art – to reawaken feeling and intuition marginalized in today’s cynical analyses.

Like the mystical traditions of countless cultures, their works assign symbols to The Unknowable, reaching through the ephemeral illusion we have come to know as reality, to an underlying, timeless, spiritual narrative. Universal mythology is interpreted with vivid imagination, and masterful technique renders it believably real.

Beneath the veil of seeming, an intuitive, visual language suggests that we are all part of something glorious, yet unrevealed. Fulfillment reflects from mystery in the primordial image, encouraging us to find, within ourselves, a unique understanding beyond the grasp of intellect…a feeling of connection…our own personal harmony with an ancient melody that is often unheard amidst the dissonance of perpetual immediacy.

Text by  Don Farrell

________________________________________________________________

I will be showing my drawing SPIRAL RAPTURE II

____________________________________________________________________

Poster featuring the artwork of  Roku Sasaki

(poster courtesy Don Farrell)

____________________________________________________________________________________

Featured Workshop with BRIGID MARLIN

To register for this workshop go to

Brigid Marlin weekend workshop, July 9 & 10, 2016

----- ~ -----

Alberta art gallery takes down student’s work after complaint over nudity

A Lethbridge student's art piece is being called, by some, too controversial for elementary school students. The Lethbridge Public School Board asked the Southern Alberta Art Gallery to take the piece down after a parent complained.

A piece of art created by a Lethbridge high school student has been taken down from where it was hung at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (SAAG) after someone filed a complaint about it. ..............​ Kimberly Tams from CBC has more.

My own 2 cents worth of comment:

Is this for real? It sounds like a bad Saturday Night Live spoof about this Alberta hick town, or maybe something one would expect to happen in ISIS controlled parts of Syria. Certainly not in a modern Western Society. That the Lethbridge School District 51 would give in to a complaint by a obviously uncultured prude is astonishing; laughable if it were not such a sad reflection on what misunderstood 'political correctness' has come to dictate, forcing the moral position of one onto the general public. What next? This piece is a brillant collage by this grade 12 student, a tribute to historical art. Next would be banning any depictions of Michelangelo's work found in places such as the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. Good enough for the pope, but oh, not suitable for the morals of prudish Lethbridge. And again, Southern Alberta's Lethbridge makes it self the laughing stock of Canada and the world! Way to go!

Pictured is a familiar piece, the Birth of Venus by Sandro Boticelli.

But it appears this made the rounds already, here is a write-up in Metro News:

A student's work has been deemed too racy for a Lethbridge school board's elementary school children after parent complaints.

The classic art remix, a collage of works including the Birth of Venus, has been whisked away to a private viewing room.  

All of the schools in Lethbridge participate in an arts program to submit student work chosen by teachers to the Southern Alberta Art Galley (SAAG) – it’s called Art’s Alive.

The works range from kindergarten-aged children to students in Grade 12.

On Wednesday of last week the Lethbridge School District No. 51 took down a Grade 12 student's work after a parent, or several parents, complained “about the content of the work.”

...... read more

by  Helen Pike Metro News

_____________________________________________

UPDATE:

I had posted the original CBC article on Facebook. One comment I found particularly fitting was by a Portuguese artist friend:

Crazyness! I would call it the "Fig Leaf syndrome". I recall the Michelangelo's David episode... but that happened in the Victorian era . Nowadays, people with such psychological disorders would make better use of their time getting adequate therapy instead of spending time in galleries. Just sayin'...

Now here is another one:

I can't avoid being shocked by the recurrent news about artwork being banned for nudity from galleries and museums. It always provides me an involuntary travel in time - but no thanks, my eyes are on the opposite direction!
-Is the artwork so empty of art that it can only activate particular parts of the viewer's brain?
- Does the viewer own a real brain, with real nervous tissue and all?
Now, seriously, worldwide perverts, blind spirits and narrow-minded religious freaks, get a life... and especially a good psychotherapist!! The rest of the world says "Ah! Good for you! Was about time!".
"What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful that the garment with which it is clothed?" (Michelangelo)
Yeah! Back to the 15th century, what a cool guy Michelangelo was. Some centuries later, yeah, the question remains urgent:
What spirit?