Saturday, October 04, 2008

Seeing With the Mind's Eye

Hi All.

Not much work of my own to present lately, so I'll continue with some regular-style "blogging" of found junk -- hopefully of interest.

Here are a bunch of images from a book I came across in the free pile at the library, called Seeing With the Mind's Eye: The History, Techniques and Uses of Visualization by Mike Samuels, M.D. and Nancy Samuels. I think it's a fascinating, evocative set of pictures. Most are labelled, but for a few I unfortunately lost any identifying artist info -- if you can name the artists for those few works, it would be appreciated. The book is probably about 30 years old, and was printed in B&W -- even though most of these images are probably available somewhere online in full color (and higher resolutions) I think they're all pretty effective, even creepy, in monochrome.

I believe this (above) is actually by Yves Tanguay.







St. George and the Dragon has long been one of my favorite subjects in art, and I save as many versions of the legend that I can find.







I love these three images by Redon (above, and the two below). I don't know much about them, but they appear to be part of a series?



Finally, this is just a random image from another book I found at the same time, but I thought it was almost "of a piece" with those from the other book.

11 comments:

Uland said...

I think the second and third to the bottom are both by Odilon Redon. Cool stuff though, I really like these ephemera posts.

Anonymous said...

THANK YOU so much for sharing this. And for this whole blog too - it's wide and deep and a treasure.

Aeron said...

Great selection of imagery, the top one reminds me of Leonora Carrington.

Human Mollusk said...

Looks like a terrific book, Jeffrey. I wonder if Alex Grey ever saw that Tchelitchew painting...
For some reason I've never been a great fan of Redon, but I love that little Cruikshank critter.

Jeffrey Meyer said...

Oh, good call about Alex Grey -- definitely see the similarity.

I've never been crazy about Redon either, but this series of "eyeball" images has made me more curious about his work.

Thanks everybody.

Uland said...

I really like Redon, but I get why people don't.

Paleo said...

Great set of images! the balloon/eye engraving its the first thing i saw by Redon when i was a kid, and i remember being disillusioned when i started seeing more of his work. Also, i have this memory of that image being some kind of homage to E.A.Poe? i'm not completely sure.

And Tchelitchew its vastly superior than Grey!

Jeffrey Meyer said...

I like Grey's stuff - particularly his technical skill - but compared to someone like Tchelitchew, Grey seems safe and comfy, verry 'hippie-ish" in the worst way. Tchelitchew seems like he's viewing the world through a horrible nightmare.

Uland, would you reccomend one period of Redon's work over another? These eyeball prints seem so different than what I've seen from him before...

Anonymous said...

A Friend of mine said neosymbolism for surrealism; when you look those symbolist drawings by Redon it makes sense even visually.
aGAiihin

Anonymous said...

A Friend of mine said neosymbolism for surrealism; when you look those symbolist drawings by Redon it makes sense even visually.
aGAiihin

Uland said...

I'm not a Redon scholar, so I can't really say. I just have a big book that I flip through. Some of it isn't that interesting to me, bu the more stark and weird stuff is cool.