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Dark Art. Art that is Dark. Angst. Pain. Nightmares composed of hideous things doing hideous things to other hideous things. It’s everywhere. It dominates our culture.
H.R Giger loves the dong!
C'mon people. Admit it.....This sucks!
Oh poor Royo. I feel your pain and agony. Let me help you with that sack of money while you climb into your Ferrari.
I am sick of it.
I’ll tell you what, I think it’s all a big scam and frankly I think it sucks. There was always a dark corner for pasty faced weirdos to draw and paint a guy hanging from the nuts with fish hooks over a pit of demons. A few dorks with no personality who read into the Sandman a bit too much had their little corner in the art world staked up. Guess what? Now these guys have taken over and the worst part is everyone is buying into it. All of a sudden heroes couldn’t wear brightly colored costumes when fighting the minions of darkness. Now the heroes are indistinguishable from the minions they fight. You see it in movies, comics, video games and TV.
Everything is dark and angst ridden.
Why EVERYTHING?!! Since when did it become uncool to be a good guy? In the latest Superman movie he’s a dead beat dad stalker!!!! That’s not the big blue boy scout I recall! If you ask me the world needs more good guys, both in reality as well as fiction. Back in the early part of this century America and it’s allies fought the darkest emo douche bag of them all. Adolf Hitler and his Nazi monsters. They were bad. Evil. Even their friggin’ uniforms looked evil man! Well our grand parents and great grandparents had a real clear cut view in their minds about Good Vs. Evil. And what it meant to be one or the other. Why? Because their culture taught them that the guys in black are evil. There is a clear distinction between the two. Look at the literature and pop culture of the time. Flash Gordon, Tarzan, need I go on? If today’s soft, deluded and self centered knuckleheads were transported to WWII the Nazis would have won. Go ahead send in the hate mail. You know I’m right.
Today pop culture teaches that there is no good. Every hero is just one traumatic experience away from being a psychopath. In order to defeat evil, good needs to be bad. It’s deconstructionism, it’s edgy, it’s LAZY WRITING. ” Batman beats the derelict senseless in order to get the location of the Joker’s Lair.” Is so much easier to write than perhaps “Batman relies on detective skills to track down the Joker” The writer would actually have to come up with an intricate plot that could possibly be interesting. Nah, I’d rather read 22 pages of Batman pimp slapping a crackhead….again.
Every good guy has to act and look evil or at least be dark.
Look at the costumes of super heroes in movies today. The only brightness is the gleam from the smile on the studio execs when they cash their paychecks. Everyone is dressed like the Matrix. It’s retarded.
Why was this made?
Wolverine looks tame! His hair is combed WTF?!!! What is this? The black leather fetish convention?
On the other hand….
Look at this Steranko X-men cover. Brilliant and powerful. These guys look like good guys and the book looks fun. Look everyone COLOR!!!
Steranko Rules Period.
You gotta love the skull eyeballs. Pure friggin’ Steranko my friends!
Or look at this exquisite George Perez mega cover! Now those are super heroes! Nothing dark and fruity about this! These are the colors I want to see in film adaptations. Why is this not possible? Is Hollywood blind as well as stupid? With HDTV and all that other hi tech crap this stuff should be pouring out of the screen and assaulting our senses! Nope. Black leather and muted colors please.
George Perez Rules! I mean look at this!
There are so many other avenues of the human condition yet to be explored by art. Why have we collectively stopped at angst? It’s self serving self indulgent crap. Let’s grow up and see that there is a bigger world out there than vampires dressed in designer outfits. I dare you!
I got to thinking about a video I made and posted on youtube yesterday. And I feel like a knucklehead for not sharing it here. Today I have remedied that.
This is my telling of the legend of La Llorona the Mexican Legend of the wailing woman. I want to share it with you guys here!
I tell the story of La Llorona Man Vs. Art Style while I paint a picture of her.
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La LLorona. Doomed to wander near bodies of water lamenting her drowned children.
La Llorona,
The wailing woman is an ancient legend of my people. It is a cautionary tale handed down thru the ages mostly by spoken word and meant to scare kids to behave and discourage young ladies from promiscuity. It is a story of love, devotion, betrayal and murder. You ‘ll be hard pressed to find a more sordid tale of tragedy and woe than that of this woman known as La Malinche, and later as La Llorona.
I first heard it from my great grandmother Mariquita Aguayo the summer of my seventh year and yet it still chills me to this very day.
La Malinche was the noble first-born child of the lord of Paynalaher on the Mexican Gulf Coast Coatzacoalcos, then a “frontier” region between the Aztec Empire to the north and to the south the Maya states of the Yucatán Peninsula. She spoke both Mayan and Aztec very well and knew the customs and and superstitions of them too. Tragically as do most kingdoms that lie between two great nations her people had suffered greatly under the obsidian blade of both super powers for as long as she could remember. In her twenties her father died and her mother remarried and bore a son. Now an inconvenient stepchild, the girl was sold to Maya slave-traders.
In 1519 she was given to the Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortés who immediately took a liking to this highly intelligent and victimized young girl. A girl who later played an active, powerful, and decisive role in the Spanish conquest of Mexico. She was instrumental to the destruction of The Aztecs and Mayans. La Malinche acted as interpreter, adviser, and intermediary for Hernán Cortés. She was also a mistress to Cortés and gave birth to his first son, who is considered one of the first Mestizos (people of mixed European and indigenous American ancestry).
Following the native traditions of the nobility she became totally devoted to her man Cortés and basically sold out the Indians to the Spaniards.
She explained Aztec and Mayan superstitions and beliefs to Cortés who used the information to gain the upper hand on the natives. Without her help Cortés and his gold greedy mercenaries would have been crushed. Instead Cortés the Conquistador was revered as a god!
She bore him more children only to be abandoned so that Cortes could marry a Spanish lady. Here we can see in the legend La Llorona’s loss is a metaphor for the Spanish rape of Mexico and the demise of indigenous culture.
Now this where it gets weird. Apparently she went mad and somehow thought she could win the affections of Cortés if the children were out of the way. So she did the unthinkable. She drowned the children and then in a total freak out of remorse she killed herself.
Tut tut! We all know she was not going to get off that easy, was she now? For having betrayed her children as well as the Mexican people, the Gods punished and damned the hysterical woman to wander, searching for her children along rivers and lakes at night for all eternity. In some cases, according to the tale, she will kidnap wandering children.
In Mexico today, La Malinche remains iconically potent. She is understood in various and often conflicting aspects, as the embodiment of treachery, the quintessential victim, or simply as symbolic mother of La Raza or aka the new Mexican people. She is often known by the pejorative term “La Chingada” (“the violated one”).
