Awa in a dwam

Color in the Metro

Ljubljana (Metelkova), Slovenia

Photography by Peter Solarz

I’m almost afraid to color this, I spent so long doing the lining for it ;-;

Managed to land the killing blow on a big beastie after falling 120 ft in my dnd game, just had to immortalize the moment!

I’ll probably post the colored version, when I finish it, so… look out for that!

Tijana Gordić (b.1986) - Untitled. Mixed media.

What people seem to know about her is that her art is commonly called “kitsch” and that her ex-husband tried to pass her art off as his own. Some animation fans might also know that her artwork inspired both the works of Tim Burton as well as the big eyed looks on Craig McCracken’s The Powerpuff Girls.

That said… I don’t think enough people realize that her art’s probably the main influence on the art movement we know today as Pop Surrealism, a movement popularized by an artist named Mark Ryden. His stuff looks like this.

If his art looks familiar, he’s the guy who did the album cover for Tyler the Creator’s Wolf.

Not all pop surrealists have taken after Mark Ryden’s style (Ron English, for example, seems mostly inspired by advertising and comic books, and his stuff is maybe a bit more reminiscient of, say, Andy Warhol)… but a lot of Ryden’s contemporaries still use similar big eyed waifs.

(Marion Peck… incidentally she’s Ryden’s significant other)

(Nicoletta Ceccoli)

A closely related art movement that seems to have some overlap with Pop Surrealism is the Superflat movement, spearheaded by Takashi Murakami. And while Murakami himself doesn’t have many big-eyed waifish girls populating his artwork, many other artists under that label actually do.

(Yoshitoma Nara)

(Chiho Aoshima)

Now… to say that Keane is the sole influence on any of these artists is terribly reductive and ignores the cultural context in which most of these art pieces are created… but you can’t deny the resemblance. Hell, Ryden even features an explicit homage to Keane in this painting.

That skirt? a reference to this piece by Keane.