Sunday, April 5, 2009

Interview with Aaron Paquette

Dear readers,

Visit the Dante's Heart journal for a new interview with Canadian artist Aaron Paquette. You can also see the color and raw vitality of Paquette's art on his blog.

The painting to the left is A Fearless Heart (2008).

Here is an excerpt from the interview:

I think we are drawn to birds first and most simply because they can fly. The story of Icarus daring to reach for the sun is locked in our collective subconscious. The air is a place for men to go in dreams, not reality! Modern technology has broken those barriers, but I think the instinctive fear and wonder of flight remains. After all, our worst dreams are still those of falling. What birds represent for us is the bridge - or intermediary - between our world and the world of the heavens, the world of dreams. They are portents of change and the fact that they come from a seed, break through the walls of one world and into the next when they are born, and then break the bonds of gravity itself! It's not hard to imagine why we have built up myths around them.

Read the rest here.

1 comment:

J.R.D.S. said...

The low quality of the videos prevents them from truly being things of beauty in themselves but I've just discovered the YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/popupfan and it's video samples of Robert Sabuda's pop-up books. I have one of them at my family's home, a book of nursery rhymes rendered in a very bold, graphic, cut-out style which was brought for my brother years ago; they're not really suitable for children at all due to the delicate nature of the cut-outs but I can fully understand the urge to take advantage of any excuse to buy one of these. The building in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2HWia_71vQ is particularly impressive and made me think of Dante's Heart and it's "Something Beautiful" feature.

Something else I think you'd like: Johann Rüttinger's trilogy of board games, Die drei Magier, Das blaue Amulett and Der Feuersalamander. Notice in particular how the Feuersalamander pieces, though abstracted, are all different from each other.