Digital Legerdemain of Loretta Lux

Critics have responded in a number of ways to the digital legerdemain of Loretta Lux, a former German painter and currently a photographer creating rather formal, quasi-portraits of children. Her creations - utilizing photography, painting, and Photoshop technique of digital manipulation - have been described as disquieting, disturbing, repellent, displaying barely sublimated eroticism, creepy, kitschy, and monstrous, as well as charming, arresting, lovely, fashion-magazine-photography-like, fascinating and beautiful.

(Study of a Boy 1)

The genre of portraiture is undermined by means of showing children who "do not belong to themselves": the portrayed children do not represent themselves, they are awkwardly distant, anonymous and unengaged figures of children, dressed in vintage clothes and willed into existence. The surreal, doll-like, emotional opacity of the children's gazes evokes what is missing, yet the artifice is not hidden but accentuated, creating thereby eerily enigmatic air of obscure, carefully composed inconsistency superficially nearing oddly smooth perfection of calculated charm. The photographed subjects are slightly altered: they have distended hands and limbs, enlarged heads and eyes, their faces wear distinctive deathly pallor, their hair is silky, and their skin translucent.

(Girl With Marbles)

The sense of staginess is dramatized by the serene, shadowless, light background, into which the children - in heavily mannered poses - are set. By virtue of such Photoshop devices as Gaussian blur, unsharp masking and level control as well as thanks to the use of manual coloring, the subtle color palette is impeccable and the composition of forms is carefully structured, underlying thus the lurking element of fantasy.

(The Green Room)

Numerous influences, especially among Renaissance and German Romantic painters (some of whom have been cited by the artist herself) might be noted. They include: Agnolo Bronzino, Diego Velázquez, Francisco de Goya, Balthasar Kłossowski de Rola (known as Balthus), Piero della Francesca, Caspar David Friedrich, Philipp Otto Runge, etc. Lux's photographs also resemble those of a German photographer, August Sander.

(Bronzino: Bia, the Illegitimate Daughter of Cosimo I de' Medici)

(de Goya: Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zunica)

(Runge: The Hulsenbeck Children)

(Velázquez: Las Menians [a fragment])

Robert Browning's Dramatic Monologue

On the ground of its unique narrative qualities, the form of poetry that has recently appealed to me most is a form called dramatic monologue. It was invented and practiced principally by Robert Browning, and it is fundamentally characterized by having an explicit - often unreliable - speaker and an implied auditor. Glenn Everett describes Browninesque dramatic monologue as having the following three basic characteristics: (1) the reader acting as a silent listener, (2) the speaker's argumentative tone, (3) the completing of the dramatic scene by the actual reader from within, by means of using conjecture and imagination [adapted from Glenn Everett, "'You'll Not Let Me Speak': Engagement and Detachment in Browning's Monologues". Victorian Literature and Culture 19 ( 1991): 123-142]. One of the best examples of an unreliable narrator in Browning's poetry features in a poem entitled Porphyria's Lover. (For a case study of the ambiguities in dramatic monologues, see "Porphyria's Lover" by George P. Landow.)

Porphyria's Lover

The rain set early in tonight,

The sullen wind was soon awake,

It tore the elm-tops down for spite,

And did its worst to vex the lake:

I listened with heart fit to break.

When glided in Porphyria; straight

She shut the cold out and the storm,

And kneeled and made the cheerless grate

Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;

Which done, she rose, and from her form

Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,

And laid her soiled gloves by, untied

Her hat and let the damp hair fall,

And, last, she sat down by my side

And called me. When no voice replied,

She put my arm about her waist,

And made her smooth white shoulder bare,

And all her yellow hair displaced,

And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,

And spread, o'er all, her yellow hair,

Murmuring how she loved me — she

Too weak, for all her heart's endeavor,

To set its struggling passion free

From pride, and vainer ties dissever,

And give herself to me forever.

But passion sometimes would prevail,

Nor could tonight's gay feast restrain

A sudden thought of one so pale

For love of her, and all in vain:

So, she was come through wind and rain.

Be sure I looked up at her eyes

Happy and proud; at last l knew

Porphyria worshiped me: surprise

Made my heart swell, and still it grew

While I debated what to do.

That moment she was mine, mine, fair,

Perfectly pure and good: I found

A thing to do, and all her hair

In one long yellow string l wound

Three times her little throat around,

And strangled her. No pain felt she;

I am quite sure she felt no pain.

As a shut bud that holds a bee,

I warily oped her lids: again

Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.

And l untightened next the tress

About her neck; her cheek once more

Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:

I propped her head up as before,

Only, this time my shoulder bore

Her head, which droops upon it still:

The smiling rosy little head,

So glad it has its utmost will,

That all it scorned at once is fled,

And I, its love, am gained instead!

Porphyria's love: she guessed not how

Her darling one wish would be heard.

And thus we sit together now,

And all night long we have not stirred,

And yet God has not said a word!

Josef Bolf's Childhood World of Anxiety

Only recently have I discovered obscure paintings by a contemporary Czech painter, Josef Bolf. Most of his pictures from 2006 onwards have been made by means of using a childly "naive" technique of scraping off of a layer of black drawing ink dabbed on a pink wax-crayoned layer. This technique by itself introduces the theme of childhood which is developed throughout. There is the surreal merging with the real, half-human and half-animal, comics stylization verging into prodigious precision, the spell of the omnipresence of ambivalence and disunity hovering over the world of childhood. There is no idealization, no safety, no carelessness, no innocence; there is perennial sense of depression and vulnerability and an obsessive longing for self-destruction. The pictured world seems to be conquered by sadness, anxiety, uprootedness, death and pain.

(Josef Bolf)

Gregory Crewdson's Constructed Realities

The following photographies come from a series of forty images shot at dusk, i.e. time when the artificial light merges with the natural, - entitled Twilight - which Gregory Crewdson (and his production team) made between 1998 and 2002. Their constructed stillness and eerie play of light together with the capitalization of the "mundane", suburban, domestic scenes create a subtly voiding and exude sense of a sublimely unfathomable narrative.

(Gregory Crewdson)