Hieronymus Bosch

Time to make up for some lost "blog karma." After all, I did just publish an entry about killing animated gerbils for entertainment. Guess I owe the world some higher-order thoughts. So I don't die. Or go to hell. Or get reborn as a largish shrub.



One of my favorite artists is Hieronymus Bosch - yes, the same Hieronymus Bosch I mention below but otherwise ignore. Anyway, Mr. Bosch is the granddaddy of all surrealism, and, I might add, quite by accident. Think of it like this - Dali tried really, really hard to make us all think he was a surrealist and an eccentric. Bosch? He painted what he felt, what he the world to be like beyond his front door. And I mean that in a literal sort of sense. Sure, there is metaphor in his work, but remember, this is a man emerging from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance not in wacky, wild, and wonderful Italy, but in the devout, slightly stodgy (in the best way possible) Netherlands (some things have, by the way, changed). This man was actively trying to portray the universe he imagined existed, a universe full of demons and angels and monstrosities, all within the context of contemporary, up-to-the minute fashion and technology. Makes you wonder if we all shouldn't reread Dante's Inferno (not to mention Paradiso and Purgatorio) again in the absence of professors of literature, doesn't it?

Well, I don't want to bias your interpertation of Mr. Bosch too much - he deserves better than that. I just want to throw a couple links at you and let you check out his work. First, as always, there is Mark Hardin's fantastic Artchive page - in particular check out St. Anthony in Meditation. And, of course, the WebMuseum doesn't let us down - here I recommend spending an hour looking at The Ship of Fools. That said, I have three other sites that have collected a whole jonx-load of images - specifically a lady named Olga's web gallery, Carol Gerten-Jackson's web gallery, and the Art Renewal Center's gallery.

In particular, I think the work of Bosch is fantastic for art history and art education for one key reason - his imagery, which may be favorably called a fine arts version of Ripley's Believe It Or Not interbred with the Book of Revelation, well, it captures your attention, and not just the attention of us artsy-fartsy types. No indeed, here is fine art you can throw up on the projector screen and get high schoolers or, dare I think it, even middle schoolers to look at. Oh, they may not shut up or stop passing their notes and listing to their, um, New Kids on the Block and Vanessa Williams or whatever, but they will absorb it. I mean hell, its tough to ignore a fish devouring a human soul. Probably.

And that is a beginning.

[cue theme song to The Facts of Life]