Tag: snow

Gabriel Palencia Ubanell – Martyrdom of Saint Eulalia (1895)

I’ve been thinking about this painting a lot lately.

It post-dates John William Waterhouse’s acclaimed painting of the same subject by a decade.

The Waterhouse version is more formally ambitious and technically complicated. Ubanell’s version is simpler–but I honestly prefer it.

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I am decidedly not Catholic so I was unfamiliar with Eulalia.

Apparently there were two martyrs named Eulalia–Eulalia of Barcelona and Eulalia of Mérida, although they may be the same person as both were martyred at very nearly the same age in the same locale.

Their stories do vary a bit. Eulalia of Barcelona–after refusing to renounce her Xtian belief, was subjected to thirteen tortures; among them: she was places in a barrel lined with broken glass and knives and rolled down the street, her breasts where removed, she was crucified on an X shaped cross, then decapitated.

Eulalia of Mérida, on the other hand, was a bit of a loud mouth. Basically bashing the Roman emperor and gods, until she was stripped by soldiers, tortured with hooks and torches and burnt at the stake–she apparently taunted her attackers until her last breath.

Interestingly, both stories involve a dove emerging from her mouth/neck stub when she died and after she died a snow came to cover her nakedness/indicate her sainthood. (Although I have an easier time buying the saintliness of the former Eulalia as opposed to the latter, who sounds like a bit of shitter, if you ask me…)

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I showed this to a fellow trans woman when she asked me what I was thinking about. She took one look at it and was like: there’ve been too many martyrs already; we don’t need any more.

I think that’s actually the best way to point to my thoughts on this painting. It appeals to me because it’s so liminal, so between: life/death, sacred/profane, embodiment/disembodiment, public/private, physical/incorporeal, pleasure/pain.

oan-adn:

The passenger

oan-adn – The passenger (2015)

The word ‘surreal’ has been so thoroughly abused as to render it now nearly impotent of meaning.

I hear people use it all the time interchangeably where terms like ‘oneiric’, ‘transcendent’ or ‘fantastic’ might better serve.

To me this image is surreal. Yes: there’s an element of it that is oneiric, i.e. the way text you read in a dream shifts as you read it. Yes: it’s–in some small way–transcendent because upon seeing this I experienced an in rush of breath and for the briefest nano second my subject perceiving an object shattered; yes, it’s also fantasic in that the train and the nude woman staring–ostensibly at me via the conjured space-time magic of a camera lens.

The reason I suggest it’s surreal is it has a feel to it of your mind playing tricks on you. For example: many years ago on what was perhaps my second trip to MoMA, I was walking to Grand Central. Although it wasn’t late, it was already dark–the sort of weather where you can smell the promise of snow in the air and the wind makes you shrink into your own core heat.

There were very few people on the streets and I remember passing a restaurant with tinted windows that looked in on the type of establishment that you’d need reservations in order to be seated and served. I wasn’t even paying attention really but I could’ve sworn there was a woman in a beautiful evening gown sitting across a candlelit table from a man, who wasn’t a man so much as a sunflower dressed in a well-heeled suit. The image stopped me in my tracks and I actually took a step back craned my neck for a second look.

Of course, it had been a trick of light, reflection and imagination. Still though, the oddity of the scene I perceived has stuck with me. It still feels strangely more real to me than the reality.

It’s that feeling I mean to convey when I term this image surreal. I feel like if I look away and look back, I will see the less interesting reality. Yet, due to some strange magic, the initial moment of mistaken perception has been transformed from passing ephemerality into something permanent. Yes, exactly that and beautifully so.

Source: oan-adn