bushofireee's blog post - Love of the dark

"Her eyes were dark and filled with nightmares, I dreamt about them every night."
VàZaki Nada


Schildersverdriet by Sierk Van Meeuwen 2010


The past month I have fallen deeply in love with the dark.
I have always found an unusual beauty in decay, death, the macabre. The past month I have fallen deeper, immersing myself in medieval history and art, where the belief of hell was a VERY real and strong aspect of people's lives. The art and artists transcend stories and tales, and would create pieces that captivated the viewer with fear, love, and every emotion one can feel - because they genuinely believed it to be true...


Hans Memling: Last Judgment Triptych (detail) 1467-71


The fall of the damned - Peter Paul Rubens. 1620

"From heaven to hell and back again, life is a funny thing. Beauty can come from the most strangest of places, even the most disgusting places." — Alexander McQueen


Dark art. Dark photography. Gothic. The unusual and the disturbing. Questions of morality. Music... Those solemn compositions that possess a melancholic undertone. All of these things have me captivated and present a sense of awe and fascination. Our history is rife with examples of dark, grizzly events - and to find beauty in such desolation is a trait that not many explore.




Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Ugolino and his Sons, 1865–67

"I’m a romantic, and we romantics are more sensitive to the way people feel. We love more, and we hurt more. When we’re hurt, we hurt for a long time." Freddy Fender


It is said that in our darkest times, when we are touched by overwhelming emotions, whether good or bad, that is when we create masterpieces. Painting, literature, music. Any creative endeavour that the creator pours their soul and loses themselves within will stand above the rest.


Gerrit van Honthorst - Saint Sebastian,detail, ca.1623.



"Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But it also gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd."
- Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

....all of this, is of course, just a theory, but one I truly believe. You can tell works where the artist has expressed their soul - they hold a quality that is indescribable - something that can only be felt.

My respect and admiration goes out to those people. Those that are touched so heavily they pour their very being into things they create.

This performance is exquisite. An unrehearsed improvisation to Satie's Gnossienne No1 - a song that I've always found hauntingly beautiful..

*sigh*