Gothic Art in Spotlight: In a sleep so deep it might be death

Happy and prosperous new year!

Today in Gothic Art in Spotlight I wish to write about an artwork by Finnish sculptor called Mia Hamari. The artist prefers to be called a sculptor but she creates beautiful paintings too. The work I am concentrating to is actually an oil painting on wood with two small wooden sculptures attached to it.

The work is called Valvojat which could be translated as the Supervisors or the Guardians or even as the Overseers. It refers to the idea that when a human is sleeping, spirit entities, like guardian angels for example, are guarding the sleep and that no harm is done to the person sleeping.

This is a very bleak painting. In the museum's info sign it read that the painting depicts "a sleeping boy". I am not sure how eternal that sleep is, if you know what I mean. Even more uncanny is the point of view: the boy looks like he is watched from an adult's viewpoint, while the boy is lying on bare ground. If one looks at the painting straight from the front, that other wooden figure looks like a melted wax candle, you know the kind people used to have in a wake.

Actually, the wooden sculptures are like small protecting totems. The other one at the top corner is shaped to resemble a stuffed toy dog and the other is slightly more ambiguous. It could be a doll or some sort of a toy bear. The face is distorted and a bit creepy. The skin of the boy looks damaged in some places, hinting of violence, and makes this painting ever so disturbing.

The painting is quite large and this painted little boy is as tall as a living 7-year-old. Or at least I thought so at the time I saw it, I have no idea how tall an average 7-year-old is. It was an impressive painting in the Oulu Museum of Art. This artwork was made during the years 2009 and 2010. The artist's own son was the model for this boy.

This ominous sleep the boy is in reminds me of old shamanism and pagan religions that were flourishing in the woods of my homeland centuries and centuries before the actual state of Finland. Shamans would often get themselves into trance to travel to the lands of dreams and even death to seek knowledge and help from various spirits.

Thanks for reading, and do tell in the comments what you think of this little boy!

A Scary Christmas Legend: Nuuttipukki from the North

Happy Holidays!

Since it is the season of Merry, I wish to share with you an old  and perhaps a bit sinister folklore story related to Christmas. Most of you are probably aware of the legend of Krampus, since an American horror/comedy movie came out this year with that same name. Really shortly said, Krampus is a mythological creature from the Alps, who is a sort of an Anti-Santa Claus. While Santa rewards nice people, Krampus punishes the bad ones. This post is about a whole other entity from the Nordic countries. This tradition spread from Sweden to Finland centuries ago, probably in the Middle Ages.

The spooky creature I am going to write about is called Nuuttipukki (it is translated as the New Year Buck in some sources), who is a horned, goat-like humanoid with an entourage of masked folk and he visits houses during the Saint Knut's Day. It used to be on January 7 but nowadays Saint Knut's Day is celebrated a week later. The tradition of Nuuttipukki still remained on the first week of the new year, though.

Nuuttipukki and his friends roam around the village and go from house to house insisting to have leftover foods and alcohol beverages after Christmas. It is bad luck not to yield to his requests, otherwise he might scare your animals, trash your garden and harass your servants (and he might still do that after food and drink, you never know with Nuuttipukki).

I wish to stress that this was not something that happened on the level of stories but in the reality too and it was not the master of the house who organized it. It was usually young men from another village who dressed as Nuuttipukki and his fellows and they might be quite drunk and mischievous. You could not be completely certain that food and booze would keep them happy.

This tradition was alive and kicking in Finland until the Second World War. Here is a photo from 1926. I believe the broom in this photo is part of the costume, to make this person more goat-like, so it is not a witch thing.

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The blackmailing (that resembles trick or treating) was not the only reason for people to let this creature and his companions to the house. The other reason people were willing to let these rascals in was that Nuuttipukki was supposed to scare off the spirits of the dead before they became evil possessing spirits. It was believed that Christmas and its celebrations lured the spirits of dead relatives back to this world. This is the oldest reason for this carnivalistic celebration: the masks were to hide who was the one scaring the dead away so that the dead could not have their revenge on this person or persons.

Here is a photo of a mask of Nuuttipukki from the 19th century Finland. It is made out of sheepskin. This mask is from the collection of the National Museum of Finland and the photo was taken by Markku Haverinen.

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Interestingly, Nuuttipukki is an older character than Santa Claus in Finland and the character of Santa resembled Nuuttipukki until the 1940's. Imagine Santa with a face like that! Even more, in Finnish language Santa is called "Joulupukki", so it is a very similar word with "Nuuttipukki".

As mentioned previously, it was believed that the dead Finns like the Christmas and in today's Finland it is still customary to commemorate the deceased relatives on Christmas. We take candles on the graves and on Christmas Eve the graveyards are astonishingly beautiful seas of candlelight. We also bring candles on the graveyards on All Saint's Day (about the same time as Halloween) to commemorate the dead and on 6th of December, which is our Independence Day, to commemorate the dead and especially those who died in the wars in which Finland fought to keep its independence. As you can see, the Finns are very respectable towards the dead.

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Thanks for reading, I hope you found this interesting and entertaining!

Creepy Reads Review: Addams Family - an Evilution

This volume has sat on my bookshelf for about two years and for some odd reason I have not featured it here on my blog. The Addams Family - an Evilution is a kind of an entertaining research on Chad Addams' creation, the Addams Family and how its characters evolved over time.

For me, the first Addams Family experience was the movies made in the 90's. After that, the old black and white TV-show. And finally I saw this book in an online shop and had the change to really read some of the original comics. This reversed order is quite understandable when regarding the fact that not the comics nor the old TV series were available at the period of time and the geographical place of my childhood. The point of this personal rambling is that the movies had shaped the way I saw the characters of Addams Family and I was surprised how different some of them are in the comics.

The Thing has changed completely from the comics and it is not even sure if the lurking little humanoid of the comics was the Thing. The old TV series made it to be a hand and I must say it is a delightful character. The Thing of the comics is seen on the photo of the front cover, it is spying the family from the window. In many of the comics there is this small creature lurking and watching, always outside of the family. In one single comic the Thing is something else than an observer: it is seen as a mere hand changing a vinyl on the family's gramophone. It is most likely this comic that inspired the character for the TV show.

The children too are relatively different and their way of interacting with each other has changed a lot in different media. In the comics Wednesday Addams is a sorrowful, quite timid child who is more like a sidekick for her brother in many pranks. This is the most astonishing difference for me and I must say I do think it is in a way improvement that Wednesday is much more livelier in the TV show and the character of the movies was a strong female role model for many a young girl.

"Well, don't come whining to me. Go tell him you'll poison him right back."

I believe though, that if Wednesday had been more livelier and stronger character in the comics, it would not have worked as well. The dynamics of the family members would have changed and it would have required alterations to the other characters too.

Morticia Addams of the movies is much more similar with the comics' Morticia. Her character in the TV series is much more warm and kooky. I do not think this is a bad thing, it is merely an observation. I love all the incarnations of Morticia.

What I really like about The Addams Family - an Evilution is that it has the comics in it but also a culture and literature analysis on the comics and it ties them to the social environment and the historical era they were created in. I can warmly recommend reading the old comics of Chad Addams and also reading this particular collection with cultural analysis on it too.

Picturesque city of Tampere

Lady Nancy from Retro Electric mentioned in a comment, that I should show more photos of the aesthetic sides of my hometown. I live in Tampere, Finland, the population is about 300 000 and it is the largest inland city in the Nordic countries (Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland). Tampere is an old manufacturing town and sometimes people call it the Manchester of Finland.

These two photos are from the older area of the city center of Tampere.

The houses next door to my flat. Unfortunately the building I live in is not this photogenic.

The eastern orthodox church. I walk past it every time I go to the university. Slightly off-topic: I have made progress with my master's thesis and things are looking good!

I would probably kill for getting to live in that green house, preferably in the tower.

This red and white building is a theater. In the upper window you can just see the huge chandelier they have.

A couple of days ago we had our first snow. Alas, it did not stay long but it made everything much prettier. The city of Tampere is divided by a river. It is beautiful with a park area on both sides.

The final photo is from the old factory, which nowadays has a shopping center, bars and bistros, museums and other facilities for culture, and a cinema.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you liked the photos!

Creepy Reads Review: Taxidermy Art by Robert Marbury

I bought a copy of Robert Marbury's Taxidermy Art - A Rogue's guide to the work, the culture, and how to do it yourself on my trip to New York last spring. I think I bought it from the museum shop on MoMA. Marbury is one of the founders and the director of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermy and an acknowledged artist.

As the title suggest, this book is non-fiction and for a person like me, who has little knowledge about how to actually make taxidermy or about its history, this was a good and informative opus. I also like the way Marbury writes, he does not became too repetitive even though the book consists of artist presentations and there are only so many ways to express certain basic information.

After the introduction to the book at hand there is also a short and compact introduction to the history of taxidermy and also to those historical persons who contributed to the development of taxidermy practices. I like that part very much, that the contemporary artists are contextualized like that.

Taxidermy Art introduces artists from all over the world, which is fantastic. Well, most of them are from the US, a few from the UK, and a couple from Europe and New Zeeland and Australia. But as the opus states the artists introduced in it are the most popular and well-known ones at the moment. It seems that taxidermy art is more popular in the English-speaking world and hence most artists are from those countries. The book presents 21 artists/artist duos.

Here are two of my favorite works and I would love to have one of these (or another of her works, her website is like a candy store for me!) myself: Still Birth (Green) and Still Birth (Blue) by Polly Morgan.

Lisa Black from New Zeeland makes gorgeous works in which animal and machine merge. I had not known about her works if I had not bought Taxidermy Art.

I can happily recommend this book. The photos are fantastic and in the end there are even instructions on how to make a taxidermy oneself. Though it is not like I am going to try them anytime soon.

A tiny bit late Halloween post

It seems like many bloggers had a lovely Halloween and I too had a relatively good one. I've been buried under my studies (no change there) but I did manage to go to my student association's Halloween party. Since the common stereotype is that every day is Halloween for goths, it is not a big deal that I am a bit late with my post.

Me and my friend decided to dress with a mutual theme and we chose this old computer game Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. Nobody recognized us, of course, but we had a really good time.  We dressed as the two personalities of a one vampire: Therese / Jeanette Voerman.

We bought some fangs from the local costume shop and the fangs were no good at all. They were cheap but unusable. The shop did not have more expensive ones, so we had to take what was available because we were horribly late with the whole costume idea. We decided it about 48 hours before the actual party. In the end we did not even use the fangs but that did not matter. :)

I used that metal nail file in the photo to make those fangs a bit smaller but they were still really impractically big. The glue thingy did not work or I did not have the patience to wait it to work. The instruction was a bit vague about how long one was supposed to wait with it.

Here is an original photo of the character Therese Voerman, as you can see, she has decided to wear glasses, though I'm pretty sure her eyesight as a vampire is exquisite. Easy to dress as, so I am not complaining!

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The much more useful product was moonlight white make-up, which worked really well, expect it dried up my face even though I had put a lot of moisturizer underneath. It looked good and that's what matters, right? :) Unfortunately the lighting was not good and hence it does not show well in the photos. Life's small annoyances, eh?

This beautiful scenery is from the centre of my home town. The city councilor or some other entity has decided to install lights above the river. The Autumn here is so beautiful.

Have a lovely November!

Gothic Art in Spotlight: biblical irony or devotion?

I had once again grand plans to make a new Creepy Reads Review but the truth is I have not had any chance to read anything else but things related to my studies. I've been feeling very stressed for the past few weeks and it has manifested in many ways, one being that I have not had the energy to read or read and comment other blogs. I believe this abstinence of blogger contact makes me more melancholic and passive, so I do try to get back into blog sphere!The best way, I hope, is to write a post.

I managed to have a short break of my overwhelming studies and went to the Espoo Museum of Modern Art aka EMMA. It is situated in the facilities of Weegee exhibition center with four other museums and one futuristic cabin that looks like a flying saucer. The exhibition center is about 20 minutes bus drive from the centrum of Helsinki, so it is a great place to visit if you are on a weekend trip in the capital of Finland.

There were many a beautiful and intriguing art works to see but here is the one that I thought was the most suitable for Gothic Art in Spotlight.

This work is made by a Finnish artist Pauno Pohjolainen 2009. It is mixed media on wood and the name of it is Court Jester. I had seen Pohjolainen's works previously but they were more abstract. From this photo you can see how 3D this artwork is. Pohjolainen's works are often quite massive and are somewhere between paintings and sculptures.

Year 2011 he has made two public works to the Cathedral of Turku. They represent the Last Supper and can be found from the artist's webpage. The webpage is unfortunately in Finnish but just scroll to the year 2011, it is easy to spot which artworks have biblical reference in them. :)

I actually find this really interesting, because the Court Jester has clear biblical allusion in it but it is not necessarily positive or without critic or irony. At least I see a lot of resemblance between the crown of thorns and this hovering circle above the skull.

I see a clear point of contact between the Savior of Christian mythology and this skull with thorns. The skull, not being human, is against Christian mythology that very clearly separates humans from animals and places man above other creatures. On the other hand, the sacrificial lamb is a powerful symbol in the Christian mythology and the face of this creature does resemble a lamb a bit.

The name of this artwork also highlight a power structure, even though it is not strictly biblical. A court jester was an anomaly, a person in a court that supposedly had no power and was ridiculous but had the possibility to bring visible other people's schemes for power. The skull is grinning a wide fool's smile with its teeth partly scattered outside its mouth. The horns are also rich of significance: the other one is broken, why? Do they resemble a Fool's Hat or more likely the biblical Devil?

I like Court Jester because it is open to various interpretations. What do you think of it?