Every month, beautiful.bizarre chooses one of our favourite artists to TAKE OVER our social media for the day. On 12 September, Jana Brike took over beautiful.bizarre and we loved seeing some her inspirations.
We are so pleased to present one of our favourite artists Jana Brike for our September Take Over. Jana’s inspirations are diverse and beautiful, and as a natural storyteller, she has put together an amazing experience for you today. Her own pieces are full of narrative, rich in symbolism and natural innocence. We hope you are all as moved as we are by her selections, to have an insight behind her thinking and creativity. Join us as we present Jana Brike TAKES OVER beautiful.bizarre socials. Over to you Jana.
Aphrodite and the Kitten painting
I feel like this painting has been kind of a turning point for me: from distanced and very surreal alien children portraits to more and more emotional, realistic and personally close paintings, sort of a visually poetic diary that is my work now.
“The Old Man and the Sea” short film by Aleksandr Petrov, animated painting, frame by frame with oil paints on glass sheets. Year 1999.
I grew up with poetic and painterly animations of Soviet and mostly Eastern European masters, and it is hard to choose just one of those. So I would like to share with you a more recent one, which is simply, painstakingly and magnificently done piece of art. Slow pace, Ernest Hemingway’s story and beautifully executed paintings frame after frame. Just beautiful.
Mika Kato “Indian Summer” 2005.
Her elaborate process consists of first sculpting life-like dolls of girls with slightly distorted proportions, then dressing and photographing them, and then creating large hyper-real paintings of them, that give out an eerie hypnotic feeling of being both, so extremely alive and real and completely surreal and impossible at the same time. A mysterious Japanese artist whose work popped in my eyes years ago, but I have seen very few of her works since then.
Lucian Freud “And the Bridegroom” 2001
I saw a huge Freud’s retrospective in Venice, Italy, ten years ago, and it just swept me off my feet completely, starting from his early surreal and sort of naive work. The Bridegroom stands out for me completely though, and I think I spent half an hour in front of it. How deep and comprehensive of a story can be told through the simple means of just one still image – the disproportion of the two figures, their poses that show both intimacy and alienation, the bare exposed nakedness. It makes me relate so deeply and almost cry.
I know some people tend to be uncomfortable about her work, but to me it smells like the beauty of most ordinary life. Truth, home, freedom and the best days of childhood.
Aron Wiesenfeld “The Winter Cabin”
He is probably my favorite contemporary painter, because of the strong eerie narrative that seems to leak deep suppressed subconscious. I would name it magical realism or something even more.
I want to share the “Atlas of Beauty” project of photographer Mihaela Noroc.
I don’t even know if it is fine art, or if it is a social or philosophical project. It doesn’t matter, because it is strong and so breathtakingly beautiful. This photographer travels and captures the natural beauty around the world showing the diversity of our planet through portraits of women. The focus of my own art has been the mysteries of a girl’s life in a symbolic and poetic way, and I deeply relate to this project.
Loretta Lux “Antonia” 2006
She is yet another author whose one piece of artwork I accidentally saw on a magazine cover in a bookshop many years ago, and had to look her up immediately. Her ability to create a strong hypnotic presence through the simplest means of portrait photography and gentle colors is just marvelous.
Caspar David Friedrich “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” 1818
Although facing the impossible task of putting together a set of inspiring artworks of a number as little as 8, I tried to at least limit myself to start from the turn of this century, I will end with just one old master. He is probably unsurpassed in his ability to use landscape backgrounds, or just landscape alone to express the deeply internal states of human emotions and mind. I am just starting to go in this direction with my seascapes, and have much to learn and grow.
This is the final piece chosen by Jana Brike. What an amazing journey into what inspires Jana and her paintings. Thank you so much for taking so much time and care in choosing your favourites.
