monsters

I saw red.

~ amandakatarina ~ Leave a comment

rednest

Arnuif Rainer

RothkoMy love of darkness and monsters will always be explored in my work.  I’ve gathered a lot of material and created a lot of pieces that speaks to the more liberal and enlightened perspectives on criminality and social justice.  These pieces are the ones that I am most proud of and passionate about. Comparatively, I have to say, I tend to enjoy making work that luxuriates in the less sophisticated dark thoughts. This time of year always puts me in the mood for Arnulf Rainer, Rothko, Goya, Mary Shelly and Bram Stoker.  This is the best time to create work that celebrates darkness, maybe I’ll do some painting. As much as I love writing, painting allows for more tactility. I feel these three pieces of art above and the quote below all effectively strike the same mood and level of feeling.  I’d like to explore writing while painting to see what types of results I get.

“My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as you cannot even imagine.” – Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Through my monster

~ amandakatarina ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking about the idea of a monster, my work previously had me questioning, what makes a criminal a criminal. I’ve been considering Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, a classic monster, a collage of human parts. A friend suggested that monsters are the creation of unchecked desires. A theory I’m considering is that we villainize what we want most. I did a mini study, I asked several people including myself what our worst fear was…I then found out the psychological association to this fear and found a direct correspondence to the persons situational state of desire. I’m aware of how abstract and cosmo this sounds, but I think with some more digging and research, I’ll find a concept to work with that links my prison characters.

This is a creative piece I wrote to start with;

Through my Monster

The exquisite pain of watching them overtakes me, unabashed they look as though the world could end and they’d only notice each other. You can tell that they are falling in love for the first time, here on this busy street corner just outside my front window, two strangers are experiencing what will be the happiest moment of their life. Young, and overwhelmed by their beaming hearts, no moment will ever compare, they will never be able to remember this moment without flooding into a blissful glee. I watch them; both so mutually paralyzed by an otherworldly happiness, they would never notice my woes of wisdom tearing at their perfect moment.

I fail at sucking the marrow of the moment, instead I feel it tinker organically against my monstrosities.

Purity, perfection, destiny, true love…
such thoughts …
Spit, Cough, Ruin, Hate…
The red light turns green, and my engine growls. Their content has made me hungry, their patience thrusts me hard through the city. Soon I’m spinning like a spider on the highways. Erratic and erotic, nothing more fulfilling or shameful.
Damaged and dark I’m coughing out cobwebs of another man’s lung.

The empathetic darkness understands, and I think of the couple only momentarily, they are the purity of the human race, and I am the other. This thought congratulates me, more then anything else could.