This is how it will be……..
This is made up of depressing images…… Unfortunately. The way the images stir you will be telling for how you approach them.
This is one that says it all.
An industrial accident…… We hope!
An accident…. We hope!
A suicide….. we HOPE!!!
This one is horrible!!
This one is what nightmares are made of!
This one is awful!
A player to finish with……….
So, there you have it, all manner of sick images to play around with…. Have fun!
Towards the end of our stay in Angola I was unlucky enough to catch malaria one day. It seems there are two types of malaria, the one that most people get, and which reoccurs at regular intervals for the rest of your life, or the other main sort, cerebral malaria, which basically kills you in about 72 hours of it kicking in.
Being me, I of course had the cerebral variety.
If you live in a malaria area, after about three months, you have to stop taking anti-malaria medicines, as they will wreck your liver apparently, so you are then dependent on insect repellant to protect yourself. And as I discovered, if you leave even a tiny part of exposed skin uncoated with this repellant, the very small and totally silent Anopheles mosquito will find it and set too to slurp up your blood, and as payment, will give you a good vein full of malaria parasites.
As chance would have it, when the malaria struck me, I was up country in Huambo, visiting and supposedly helping the Halo Trust deminers with various computer problems. As it turned out, this was extremely lucky for me, as I was in an area where malaria was horribly common, and all the local Angolan doctors knew all about it – unlike the worthy western doctors one tended to see in Luanda who habitually treated people with malaria symptoms for flu, as a colleague who was infected on the same day as I was, and who as a result of the misdiagnosis almost died and had to be evacuated to South Africa when it was belatedly realised he was on the point of dying from cerebral malaria, and not simply suffering from a bad go of flu.
The first I knew of my infection was when I developed a nasty head ache one evening, and a general feeling of illness.. Nothing very specific, but I felt lousy. So I took to my bed and thought to simply sleep it off and be better the following morning. Not to be.
As the night passed, my head ache got worse, and I had bad stomach aches and dizziness attacks… But I managed to sleep more or less. However the following morning I told the others that I would spend the day in bed, assuming that a day’s rest and lots of paracetamol would fix me up.
But as the day went on, I began to develop a serious fever and started to hallucinate, and began to feel sicker and more lousy than I had ever felt in my life. One minute I was unbelievably cold, shaking violently and totally uncontrollably, the next I was boiling hot and sweating. And all the while feeling sicker and more awful by the minute. My head was aching fit to bust, my stomach was bloated and hurt like hell, I was dizzy, so much so that there was no way I could stand up, but even lying down the world was spinning around me.
I have never felt so bad in my entire life, and it simply kept getting worse, so when I was in the cold phase of my fever, I was scared I was going to break my teeth as I was shaking so hard and my teeth were chattering so hard.
Luckily Nathanial came back to the house in the early afternoon, took one look at me, and grabbed his malaria test kit, and stuck a pin in my finger to get some blood for the test. It showed that I had malaria, so he picked me up and slung me in the landrover and off we went to the nearest hospital were in no time a large and friendly Angolan doctor saw me, he also took one look, didn’t bother with any tests but simply gave me some medicine or other which was apparently for malaria, and amazingly and miraculously, in a matter of minutes most of the symptoms had disappeared and I felt almost human again.
Once I was more or less back in the word of the living, he explained what the prognosis was if I hadn’t managed to see a doctor before another night had passed – simply put, I would have been dead.
A very sobering thought believe you me.
Anyhow, thanks to whatever the medicine was that he had given me, I didn’t die (you may be surprised to read), and he prescribed some medicine that I would have to take for the next month or so, and told me the worst possible news as well – no beer for at least a month!
Amazingly enough, by the following day I felt well enough to get back to the work I was in Huambo to carry out for the Halo Trust guys, and in due time returned to Luanda and my normal daily life in Angola… None the worse for my malaria experience. But I do have an enormous sympathy for the millions of people every year who are not as lucky as I was, and who die because of malaria. And thus I am a supporter of the Gate’s Foundation’s work in anti-malaria studies in Africa.
And of course, extremely glad that Nathaniel was there to save me as well!!!! Quite literally his prompt actions saved my life, for which I am eternally grateful to him of course.
I have come across an extremely unusual artist in the last few days, a most extraordinary artist, whose work appeals to me! His work has attracted to me in the most unusual fashion.
So, let us see his work and then go on about it.
He goes about his work in the most unusual way…. As you can see. He says in his website that he gets inspiration from his wandering mind….. He says it all in his website.
Redmer Hoekstra (1982) graduated from the Art Academy in Zwolle as a visual artist and illustrator in 2009. “I’ve always loved alienation and fantasizing, daydreaming. As a child I had all kinds of theories about how the world worked. At the Academy I was able to rediscover this and process this in to my work. How things work is a fascination of mine and in many drawings you can find this. I open up appliances and objects and freely change what is inside. Often a subject gets a completely different feeling or meaning.
I play with form, meaning and function, while new combinations arise.
Often surprising, strange and funny but also with a strange kind of logic, a fantastic and surreal world.
I find my inspiration riding the train or on the road, where my mind can float through the landscape and new connections between things appear. A philosophical view of the world and myself. Who am I? What is my reality and how do I get to decide how it looks and works? They are pen drawings on paper. I work with fine liners . By shading I create light and space, which gives a drawing life. It is important to draw as realistically as possible, to make the alienation most powerful. It’s a laborious and almost artisanal technique . A drawing on average takes 32 to 40 hours.
So all that remains is to illustrate this blog with his work……..
So, there you have it…. His artistic endeavours.
His art is attractive, and I love it, the weirdness of it, and the unusual way he goes about his artwork, drawing it as opposed to using lithography or etching attracts me too.
It remains only to post his website…… That way you will be able to get in touch with him, or – even -buy some of his artwork! https://www.redmerhoekstra.nl/
So, there you have it!
There is the first image……. Really strange!
And here is another one!
And here is another one!!!
And her is yet another one…. This is a big catch!
And yet another one!
A strange road!!!!
And yet another one!
So, there we have it! A couple of images for you to use, if you wish!
Once again I have found an intriguing collection of images that I hope will be of use to you guys as sparks to your ideas. In other words, I hope that the images below will give you ideas for stories as opposed to using them in stories.
So, lets get started on them……………
Now this is a restaurant with a difference! A weirdly odd and somewhat Edwardian effect. Many years ago whilst on a winter tour of Scotland with the Little Angel Puppet Theatre we found ourselves at John O’Groats which has a truly odd restaurant as well – and when we arrived there, a totally empty place (it was January after all) we were greeted by this odd building and Hawaiian guitar music blaring out of a public address system… All very odd.
One or other of these two odd images should give you ideas for a story….. Though certainly with a Gothic feel I would imagine.
From the sublime to the ridiculous now.
I would imagine that this silly photo could be the basis for a Sci-Fi story at the very least……. Whilst it is a simple bit of image jiggery-poky and is also mildly funny, it could be the basis of a story about a world in which people’s bodies are manipulated for some reason….. What do you think?
This is simply silly…………… But it is a new look at an old legend perhaps?
Now I have selected three more odd or curious images that give me pause for thought, each one of which seem to me to be ripe with an internal story.
What is happening in them and could one perhaps use all three of them in one story?
Well, perhaps one might use the first two in one story, but I am damned if I can see how one might use the third image in the same story as the first two.
And to finish with, here is a collection of creatures that one would not like to come up against on a dark and stormy night – or even on a sunny day come to think of it! I have no idea what or who they are, I suspect it is some sort of Swiss (or Scandinavian) religious ceremony that has been stolen (as is the case with just about all Christian festivals) from a pre-Christian festival. But whatever it actually is all about, it seems to me to be begging for a story to use it as a central feature of the story. So, lets see what you can do with this one!
If any of these images have been a help for you in any way, please do let me know what you used them for.
Fred Einaudi is one of the oddest and most disturbing painters working today – or at least that is my feeling, and once you have had a look at some of the paintings below, I think you will probably agree with me on this. So before discussing this artist, I thought i would give you […]
Fred Einaudi is one of the oddest and most disturbing painters working today – or at least that is my feeling, and once you have had a look at some of the paintings below, I think you will probably agree with me on this.
So before discussing this artist, I thought I would give you an example of his work, so you know what it is we are looking at here.
This is reasonably typical of his work. Most of his paintings are extremely realistic, in the sense that they could be photos, but in fact all his work is oil on canvas, and all of them without exception are morbid and worrying in what they depict.
So, who is this guy? Well he was born in 1971 in a small town in Nevada, but moved to San Francisco as soon as he was able, which is where he now lives and works.
And this is what he looks like…..
Sort of tells you a lot I feel.
The next question I wanted an answer to was why he paints such depressing images? Does he have a death fixation? Is he simply sick, or is there a much deeper reason for his choice of subject? Continue reading “Fred Einaudi – A Very Odd And Morbid Artist”
Kenneth Provost is a Belgian photographer of abandoned places. Wandering around his native Belgium with his camera in his hand he discovers all manner of abandoned factories, houses and similar urban detritus, and makes the most wonderful photos of them. Apparently he was given his first serious camera about 4 years ago, and promptly went […]
Kenneth Provost is a Belgian photographer of abandoned places. Wandering around his native Belgium with his camera in his hand he discovers all manner of abandoned factories, houses and similar urban detritus, and makes the most wonderful photos of them.
Apparently he was given his first serious camera about 4 years ago, and promptly went out into his city of Ostend and discovered that he was surrounded by the most wonderful old and abandoned buildings, which he proceeded to explore with the happy results you will see below.
All of his photos have the quality of suggesting that some sort of important and significant events occurred to or in the places he shows us, which he doesn’t feel any need to expand upon, simply leaving it up to us to conjure up an explanation of what we are looking at. They hint at tragic events, terrible loss of life, the breakdown of society and all manner of other equally serious events.
The main reason that I wanted to draw your attention to his work, is that all of his photos would be superb as starting points in any writing classroom. Each of them contains enough emotion and imagery to supply an entire story line for a short story at the very least.
I shall post a few of his images below to give you a taste of his vision of the world, and also his website so that you can go directly to him and buy any images that you feel would be useful to you.
I emphasise the idea of buying his images from him, as this is how the man makes his living, and it would obvioulsy be totally wrong to make use of his vision without paying for it, so if you like what you see below, please go by his online shop and purchase as many as you can use.
Link to his Website: Kenneth Provost, Photographer.
The internet is a source of the most amazing and extraordinary images, many of which simply cry out to be used as starting points for short stories. For example, if you see this photo (see below) it has to make your mind begin to wander around all manner of possible stories.
What on earth is happening in this photo? Why is that nonchalant young woman sitting on her bed apparently being embraced by a large and peaceful bear? Is the bear comforting her? Why is she apparently ignoring the bear? What on earth is she doing, dressed only in her nightgown, with a large and amiable bear beside her?
As you can see, such an image could surely be used by your students (or yourself) as the starting point (or equally, the end point) of a short story of just about any genre.
I have long been fond of using such images to get my writing juices flowing, and the advent of the internet has been a real boon to individuals such as I in this respect. So much easier than having to go to a library and ploughing through volumes of stuff to find that one exciting image that I need to get me going.
It is a curious fact that abandoned houses, towns and other man made objects, when we have finished with them, and left them to rot away on their own, frequently acquire a new sort of beauty, as I hope you will see in the photos I have collected from around the web to illustrate this point.
Generally when we think about stuff that we have thrown away, or abandoned, we tend to think that it will be ugly, messy and generally a bad idea, as in this image below.
And of course, to a large extent this view is correct, rubbish is rubbish, and highly undesirable. But having said that, there remains a sort of haunting beauty in old and abandoned buildings and cities.
A tristesse is always lurking in the background whenever one finds oneself confronted with the ruins of what was once a home, or a village. If you consider the photo below, you will see what I mean.
On one level this is a horrible, rotting mess, but on another level one is forced to think about the people who used to live in this room, what sort of stuff did they watch on that remarkably clean looking TV set, why did they have such large armchairs in their bedroom, set out in order to watch TV in comfort? Who were they, and why did they leave? I am afraid I have no idea, as I do not know anything about this image, other than what it says for itself. Patently a sad story is lurking in the background here, something that caused them to leave quite hurriedly it would seem.
Even in buildings that were never lived in by families, we see the same sort of brooding atmosphere. This image of an abandoned Sanatorium in Germany is such an image.
Continue reading “Abandoned Places Have A Beauty All Their Own”
I don’t know if you have noticed a rather disturbing new activity on-line, especially in places such as Facebook, and that is the “art” of Face Swapping. Basically this takes the form of taking a photo of two or more people or animals and using a program such as Photoshop, swapping the faces over, so you end up with, for example, a photo of a man and his baby, in which the adult body has the face of the baby, and the baby’s body has the face of the adult, as in this example here…..
You see what I mean about it being rather disturbing?
I first saw this idea when a series of beautifully executed images of Rowan Atkinson appeared on-line, in which his face had been placed in a number of famous art works, such as this example below.
Normally there have to be two bodies in the image, so that one can see that it is in fact a swap, but obviously in the case of Rowan Atkinson, his face is so well known that the second body is not needed,
One might assume the same rule applies when dealing with well known public figures, such as Donald Trump in this one, but the maker of this image obviously felt safer with the cat in the image as well……………..
Neither of them have pleasant faces… a grumpy looking Trump and a downright nasty looking cat… Oh well.
OZTHOUGHTS 