Ina Mar “Art and The Earth” Blog

Waiting for a Phantasy (sketch) by Ina Mar, mixed media (photo, objet trouvé, collage, photomanipulation, digital painting, writing), 2009, Series surREALITIES

This one’s about waiting. About the fatal identity of the one who waits for a promised (or hoped for) sign, waiting for a proof of feelings, hoping for silent communication, without reciprocity. Sense of time, sense of proportions, sense of reality are lost. There is a scenography of waiting: the one who waits defines the place of the waiting, manipulates facts, makes suppositions, provokes their own thoughts, defines their own ways of acting and reacting, that escalate to anxiety and abandonment. Truths are confused with fantasies and wishes. The delay of the other is analyzed and at the same time the one who waits is brainstorming, having a mixture of unimportant and substantial thoughts, which are described in a detailed way in the background text (written by me).
In fact what I am publishing here is just a sketch, I’m still struggling with improving some details, refining some contours, hand-writing/scanning/integrating the text. I tried to give this work an abstract and an African-wall-hanging look.

For the texture, I used:

• a crincled, irregularly scissor-cut photocopy of a woman’s abstract body by Picasso (see image)
• a scanned knife (see image). I had just cut cheese with the knife, so it was a bit dirty and had fingerprints. That created a nice structure on the image. (It was French cheese – I hope you’ll still buy my artwork when it’s finished)

OK here’s the latest artwork, “Drowning in your ocean”, a girl lying in the bottom of an imaginary ocean: Sleeping? Dreaming? Dead? Immobilized by depression? You may interpret it as you like.

She has become one with this environment. Woman and ocean are a unity in the dimensionality of an imaginary space. There is a correspondence between the inside and the outside. A sea turtle, a fish, sand and seaweed have become encrusted into her body. The body is the very ocean itself, and the ocean is at the heart of her flesh.

The two horses on bottom right symbolize borderline situations between phantasy and reality and their mariage.

Drowning in Your Ocean by Ina Mar, November 2009, Series surREALITIES
Mixed media, mainly photomanipulation and digital painting

Following poem titled “Your Absence” goes with the artwork:

Your absence – too long – I cannot move
Injecting
anesthetic through my numb and empty heart
now I  wake from a coma
see visions of you
those Words we couldn’t mumble
that Warmth we couldn’t share

I’m dazzled by the nudity
of your soul set free
a boundless ocean for me to
glide and gleam like a silverfish
You set me moving again
I’m becoming iridescent
golden hues, silver hues
my eyes can’t rest in your ocean
but
wherever i swim, i’m lost
wherever i dive, i drown
so deep and dark it is
(Text by Ina Mar, adapted by Damian Bullen)

Since a couple of weeks, I’ve been working on this new image in vintage look, exploring the theme of old age and memory loss:

Growing old is a wonderful thing by Ina Mar, 2009, mixed media

Here is the text embedded in the background of the artwork:

If I ever die, I wish to die of love, for example to die suffering of desire or be a victim of a crime of passion. It’s terrible to die of any other cause. Imagine dying of a sickness or just from old age!
Listen, I think I am growing younger every day. I am becoming smaller, losing weight, losing my hair, my skin is now soft like that of a baby. Touch it! See? It’s so soft! I believe I will soon be your age again. As soon as I am young again, I can take you to the end of the world. We’ll start a completely new life together. I am really sorry I didn’t remember your name. But the warmth of your hands is familiar to me. I am sure I have loved you passionately in the past.
Did you know that it’s possible to fall in love with the same person more than once in one life? Age gives you that strength by taking away memory. Loss of memory brings the freshness of rediscovery. I am now able to fall in love with you again and again. (Text: Ina Mar)

Some of my layers:

• Doll
• Photo of the right hand of a person I love (top)
• Hand taken from a painting by Egon Schiele (bottom)
• Eiffel Tower, taken from a vintage postcard. Stamp and postage from the same postard
• Photo of a breast (right, middle)
• Photo of trash and paper debris
• Ink and blood stains (hand-painted on the debris) (in Photoshop of course!)
• Several text layers with several colors and effects
• Distressed effects using the background of an old black and white photo of my father
• Frame taken from a vintage photo. I liked its irregular, destroyed corners. Just used the frame from this photo.

Tiger Dream by Ina Mar, 2009, mixed media (photo, drawing, collage, text), series surREALITIES

The “Tiger Dream” is an atypical erotic encounter between a tiger and a young boy.
It’s the description of a dream situation: A girl dreams of a boy lying on her bed, his head slightly leaned to the back, showing his uncovered neck. The girl’s head transforms into a tiger head. She carefully takes his neck into her mouth. She does not bite him or hurt him.

The tiger’s spoken words (”Is that you lying on my bed? I promise not to hurt you.”) are written over his head while the boy’s intime thoughts (”It would be nice to be sexually abused by you.”) are written inside his head.
There is also a sleeping child inside the boy’s head (reference to Egon Schiele’s “Blind Mother”, 1914) and the words “still a kid deep in his soul”, alluding to innocence.

I wish to create a contrast between innocence and sexual pleasure (two facets of the boy) as well as gentleness and violence (two facets of the tiger).

Here’s a detail of the artwork:

Tiger Dream by Ina Mar, detail

The palette contains “agressive”, “unrealistic” colours (blood red, deep orange, black and saturated yellow), that allude to the dream world.
The size of the original is 19.7 in x 15.7 in (50×40cm).
The techniques used are digital photo, pencil drawing, photocopy, collage, digital manipulation.
Series: surREALITIES
Where to buy it: You can buy a reproduction of “Tiger Dream” on Imagekind.

Hello, long time without updates…

I am currently working on some artworks for my new series “surREALITIES“. It will be a series of surrealistic/fantasy images using mixed media, namely a mixture of photography, drawing, scanned painting, photocopy, scanned objects, as well as texts or poems I’ve written. I am trying to mix not only media but also the mind conditions: realities, remembrances, dreams, sensations are mixed with daydreams, trances, virtualities and visualisations, till the limits between them are blurred. The images and accompanying texts have the hallucinatory quality of dreams, though confusing with the presence of trivial elements.

The first artwork I just published is called “Futile Attractions #01“, a dreamscape / erotic phantasy showing a woman suffering from hallucinations induced by desire. The image explores the  capacity of desire to transform reality.

The palette is suggestive to the human body (skin tones, flesh tones, earth brown, blood red, light pink) in order to give the image sensuality, a bodily presence, a human presence. Used the canvas as a container for bodily sensations that come to an explosion through mental pictures described by the woman in the text. The textures give the image a vintage look.

The object on the right top is a black chain, disposed in a way that it makes an allusion to both a phallus and an umbilical cord. At the same time, the woman is “floating” in an embryon-like position. This umbilican cord symbolizes her connexion to the beloved person: physical and addictive.

Futile Attraction #01 by Ina Mar, Series surREALITIES, 2009, Mixed Media

Futile Attraction #01 by Ina Mar, Series surREALITIES, 2009, Mixed Media, detail

Futile Attraction #01 by Ina Mar, Series surREALITIES, 2009, Mixed Media, detail

The size of the original is 80 x 60 cm (23.40 x 32.00 inches).
You can buy a reproduction of “Futile Attraction #01″ on Imagekind. Please avoid very small reproductions, because the text will not be readable and the texture effects will not be visible!

One of my inspirations for this work was Cy Twombly’s “Ferragosto” series, especially for the choice of colours:

I’ll soon be publishing the second artwork of the series, “Your ocean”, in blue and yellow tones.

My latest “I hate art” quote:
I hate art because it is not understood. Lost in an abyss of feelings and ideas, sunk in pure melancholy and solitude, in an act of desperation to express themselves, artists create works that make people …HAPPY!

I am preparing a series of “I hate art” quotes…