Felicity's Favorite Art

I intended to post about my favorite entries from ArtPrize in the week leading up to Halloween, since they sort of have a Halloween-y vibe. The big day came and went before I got around to writing anything, however, and it would have been totally lame to post the photos by themselves without explanation. So let's all just pretend it's still October for a few minutes, okay? The turkeys can wait.

The Voyage

Isn't the style of this oil painting awesome? I love the contrast of the crisply detailed ship to its artistically blurred surroundings. The ship seems old, worn, and spooky. The muted color palette, shadowy undertones, enveloping clouds, and the bold dark frame add to the effect.

Black Panther

The same artist who created the silk-embroidery-on-silk owl last year was back again this year with this black panther lurking behind a tree. It is every bit as impressive as the owl, too: it has the same intricate detail and sheen. She's captured the velvety texture of the panther's fur perfectly, and the whiskers look incredibly real too. 

This next photo gives you an idea of the size of the panther. How she can make any sense of all those threads I can't begin to understand.

DARK TREES
This entry was a short black and white film. I wish I could share a link to it so you could see it for yourself, but unfortunately I can't find it anywhere online. So, you'll have to settle for my description of it and a few frames from the ArtPrize website to illustrate.

This film was being projected on two separate screens in a dark room on a low floor of a big old brick building - a building a lot like the one in the film itself. One screen continuously showed shots of leafless trees casting shadows on the outside of the building. 

On the other screen on the opposite wall was a man wandering around inside the building, which is oppressively dark and empty. The man sometimes seems to be trying to find a way out and sometimes more fleeing from mysterious sounds within the building. He strides down long hallways, 

ascends and descends staircases and ladders, finds himself in the basement 

and on the roof, but no matter what he tries or where he goes, he can't get out of the building. The doors are always too securely locked, and the windows  are always out of reach.

Things sometimes get confusing, with the man ascending a ladder and finding himself in the basement, for instance. The screen showing the tree shadows and the screen showing the man in the building would switch every so often too, so the viewers had to keep shifting where they were looking to follow the action. All this and the dark instrumental music playing in the background gave this film a nightmarish quality. And in case you were wondering, the poor guy never does get out. The film is on a seamless loop.

Vanishing

This entry is a series of acrylic paintings on sand and canvas. The subjects are endangered animals, species that are vanishing in the wild due to human-caused issues like climate change and poaching. To illustrate the vanishing part, the artist has included additional faint, ghost-like images of the animals in the background. My favorite ones were the leopards, as I thought it was really cool how the ghost versions blend in so well with the rocks.

Abiding in the Shadow

This installation's paper mountain may leave much to be desired, especially when you compare it to the ritzy hotel scenery around it. At least the barbed wire deer and wolf sculptures, the stars of this anyway, stand out nicely against the light color. Looking at this at first, I was all bummed out: 5 wolves closing in on that poor deer. He seems as doomed as the dude trapped in the building.

Or maybe not? According to the artist's blurb, the deer may make it through this after all. He has speed, strength, and endurance, and sharp antlers and hooves. He's still a formidable adversary for the wolves, as the big shadow he's casting is supposed to illustrate. Likewise, this artist's point with this is that all is not necessarily lost when "wolves bear down on us" in this life, not when we're abiding in the shadow of our inner strength.

Okay, that's enough not-so-cheerful-ness for one weekend. Time to go back and talk about HI2 a bit before I go.

Halloween on HI2 was short and sweet for us, since we didn't have much time after school to play before the humans all left and the doll Halloween party began in the basement. 

Our fluted wild of the day was appropriately ghostly, though:

Too bad about his stats. It would've been fun to have a ghostly caught-on-Halloween horse in the herd. Oh well, staying with us and our hoard of horses would probably have been too scary for him anyway.

Like it or not, it really is November already now! We've still only captured one +6/6 wild horse this year. Wow. Are we pathetic or what?

Thanks to Bethany's persistent livery stalking, our herd may have finally increased by one more +80 horse anyway. Check out this mare that she found on Thursday night:

Her color may not be that interesting, but I think her stats, stately pose, and her markings make her anything but ordinary.