A movement to make art lacking highly cultivated and intellectual tastes acceptable? What is tasteless art? Insanity art? Irrationalized realism art? or just abnormal representational art? (I denounce 'art' as nothing more than an anagram for 'rat'.)
Actually the first art (European paintings) to get a lowered brow from the public was probably the French Impressionists works, particularly vanGogh.
Then there was the whole modern art movement the first part of the twentieth century. But even the Dadaists went the way of the impressionists,
they were accepted in to the collectable art world, and promoted to the extent of degenerating into minimalist nonfigurative gagaism.
Now lowbrow art is the new visual assault 'underground comics' based art.
There are however a number of truly dangerous artists, such as
Laurie Hogin, with her ferocious furry animals
Walton Ford and his Audubon Satires.
Then there are people producing psychotic visuals with fine art techniques:
Mark Ryden, a childs world with raw meat.
Micheal Hussar, macabre nudes and more.
and several absurd conceptualists like:
Joe Sorren: child like body languege.
Nhoj Yesdnil: maniacal ravings etc.
Most of these can be considered pop surrealism. (Most surreal art has lost
it’s origins of exploring ones dreams in favor of looking like science fiction and other strange worlds.)
My own style of surrealism looks like it’s exploring my repressed anxieties, but who wants that on their walls.
There are alot of people giving up the modern art of the last century, looking back to the masters of the 15th threw 19th centuries. (Bosch and Brugel are very popular). And still there are too many people influenced by the simplicity of modern art.
My own new paintings are influenced by Joseph Noel Paton's fairy paintings of the 1800's; Peter Brugel the elder’s work from the 1500's; the Victorian painter Francois Boucher's amazing pictures of cherubs etc.; and strange-cute animals, because they epitomize the insanity of modern life.
I expect people to lower their brows in confusion and discontent when they see the juxtapositioning of opposing images in my pictures. (such as a spectacular seascape with an ecstatic angel and rats looking on in amazement.) But I just can’t stand boring art.
I believe the only way to subvert the dominate paradigm of art needing to be bland to be beautiful, is to have fun using classic painting sensibilities in new and imaginative ways.
The revolt against life’s lethargic tendencies provokes me to create absurd art in order to understand the enigma involved in the real world.
People have tried for ages to control life’s preposterous situations by creating a rigid implicatory (religious and militaristic), unfortunately trying to eliminate the wide array of variables only makes more and dangerous possibilities.
That is why I believe that making art for the sake of beauty is a form of denial, and labeling a picture "Lowbrow" is an attempt to ignore your inability to comprehend ones own primordial fear.
Nhoj Yesdnil
From the Funny Farm
