Saturday, May 26, 2007

Remedios Varo 1908-1963




Remedios Varo

Remedios Varo was a very unique and imaginative surrealist painter who was born in Spain. She hung out with other artists in Paris for a time, but fled to Mexico in 1941 where she remained for the rest of her life. She died at the young age of 55 during the peak of her success. Her best friend was Leonora Carrington, another well-known woman surrealist who used to be Max Ernst's girlfriend. These are the things that I find fascinating about Varo: her use of architecture, her inventions of strange vehicles, her big-eyed spooky characters that seem to emerge out of the ether and aren't quite real, crazy hairdos and weird costumes, her creative story-telling qualities, and the many different textures she created for backgrounds in her paintings. She had an imagination that didn't quit!
Varo was an intellectual and "was influenced by a wide range of mystic and hermetic traditions, both Western and non-Western. She turned with equal interest to the ideas of C. G. Jung as to the theories of G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, Helena Blavatsky, Meister Eckhart, and the Sufis, and was as fascinated with the legend of the Holy Grail as with sacred geometry, alchemy and the I-Ching. She saw in each of these an avenue to self-knowledge and the transformation of consciousness."-read more:

No comments: