Group items tagged

very well developed description + analysis of the Romantic tradition

Shaun began drawing and painting images for science fiction and horror stories in small-press magazines as a teenager, and has since become best known for illustrated books that deal with social, political and historical subjects through surreal, dream-like imagery. Books such as The Rabbits, The Red Tree, The Lost Thing and the acclaimed wordless novel The Arrival have been widely translated throughout Europe, Asia and South America, and enjoyed by readers of all ages.

The artist was born in Bremen Germany on December 24, 1952. Freelance artist since 1980. Several artshows of his work in and outside his homecountry. Siegfried Zademack's surrealistic visionary paintings make recipients and reviewers wonder. The arrangement of his pictorial thoughts immensely exceeds a realistic reproduction. His pictures allow us to slip in metaphysical dimensions, between humorous irony and the unfathomable deepness of our souls. The semantic sources of this art are equally past and present. The quotation from art history stands alongside the Coca-Cola bottle. His true teachers were the masters of the earl and late Italien Renaissance up to the Mannerists. The syntax of his work is completely determined by that of the ciassical masters. What is astonishing is that, in adoptingit for his own pictorial inventions, he employs such perfect techniquie - though this is indispensable, in view his objectives. His figural inventions are clearly sculptured, but his iconology presumes considerable knowledge of art history and politic. In some of his pictorial quotes, we detect the difference to the Surrealist approach: it is the historical angle, which was yet possible and this is the present-day aspect - in manneristic periods. Descartes had seen this without making an issue of it: mundus est fabula, the world is a grand fable, a never-ending story in which we are forever entangled. lf we live from, stories, there are no sharp borderlihes between periods, for history is then the present, and anything we do now is already the future. This is the link between Boltraffio's Madonna and the American Way of Life, which makes no distinction betweeh the classics and Coca Cola.

Nina Berman is a documentary photographer, widely published and exhibited, with a primary interest in the American political and social landscape.

Eric Cadien attended the 'art school' during the dynamic seventies when self- reliance and self-determination became the political watch-words that guided Jamaica beyond independence towards self-government and Democratic Socialism.