Painting by Robert Steven Connett

ZOOOIDS – Underworld II (Robert Steven Connett, 2009, Acrylic on canvas)

Here is an amazing painting of fantastic glistening underworld creatures.  I greatly admire the artist, Robert Steven Connett, a self-taught contemporary painter who crafts baroque landscapes of dark lifeforms and gleaming spirit-things.  At their best his works come together to portray life as an interwoven web of symbiotic appetite and need—a phantasmagorical ecosystem of amalgamation and ingestion.   It is as though Giger were a gifted mycologist or invertebrate zoologist.  As far as I can tell, Connett has made few inroads in reality, where art is controlled by a click obsessed with fatuous celebrity and tiresome naval-gazing deconstructionism.  However he has created his own strange markets online (in much the same way that he builds his own imaginary underworld ecosystems).  It almost gives a person hope.

I realize this has been an art-heavy week…but I will make it up to you next week when, in celebration of Halloween, we have a whole week dedicated to a unifying theme of macabre terror.  The Halloween themes of years past–the children of Echidna, the Flowers of the Underworld, even the spiritual and ontological horrors of the undead–raised no eyebrows on the internet, so I am ratcheting up the dreadful violence this year.  Steel yourself for the frightful flesh-cutting terror…uh, and for more art too I guess.

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