Lauren: The Uncanny, Internal Sourcing

Internal Sourcing:

I could relate more to this section on a personal level and found all three artists discussed interesting in their own ways. Rist was a bit too offbeat for me—I hate the idea of love-starved maidens so her whole platform annoyed me. But I found the end paragraph of her article interesting because of how it mentioned that she was now married with children, and how her new position of finding love in her life might affect her work. This is truly a conundrum: if your work stems from emotional turmoil, does being content make you a bad artist? I think of the musical artist Tori Amos, whom I have been a fan of since I was a kid. Much of her early work dealt with emotional turmoil that results from a rape and multiple miscarriages, but ever since she finally had a daughter her music has been lacking something. Happy Tori isn’t as good of an artist as Angry Tori. It seems so typical in a way, because I think there is a stereotype that some artists feed off of misery.

LaVerdiere and Harrison interested me more on a personal level, in terms of approach. I loved how LaVerdiere incorporated unnoticed or underappreciated historical facts into his inspiration, and how Harrison was fascinated by the primal relation of the animal to our psyche. These two combined are sort of how I work; I think it’s a mistake not to be inspired by the facts of the world around us and it’s a little sad, sometimes, to see other fantasy artists so caught up in mythical creatures that they don’t take time to appreciate real ones. This world is a crazy, bizarre, weird place with all sorts of natural monsters (ocean creatures and parasites in particular). Instead of wishing things I imagine could exist, I like to think about how they would have existed if evolution had gone down a slightly different path.

The Uncanny:

Okay, I like Freud a little better now; I had no idea the idea of the uncanny had been part of his psychological theory. Indeed, I never realize the idea had a name at all. But this concept is one I’ve been aware of an fascinated by for a long time and strived to incorporate into my own work. Although I am in tune with Aestheticism, I also believe the most beautiful things are things that have disturbing qualities that give them a surreal, dreamlike, or “uncanny” feel.

The idea of fear or being disturbed is a difficult feeling to evoke in everyone. Horror films are a good example of this—these days a lot of horror films focus on gruesome violence and the “gross out factor” and leave psychology by the wayside. But looking back at what are considered to be the best horror films and thriller movies, the names that crop up are the ones that left the details to the viewer’s imagination. Like Hitchcock’s “The Birds”, the most frightening things are ones you are never offered an explanation or resolution about. They in themselves are not scary, but the ideas they suggest become scary the more you dwell on them. This feeling of the uncanny happens in everyday life as well. Everyone, I think, tries to rationalize coincidences and strange events, and can become very distraught when they’re unable to put order to things they experience. We love to fantasize about extraordinary events, but become frightened when they seem to occur in reality.