DarkEarth95

Dieric Bouts is another medieval master that a new friend of mine just introduced me to. His style is dark, like Hieronymus Bosch, and a little surreal too. In this painting, titled "Hell" you see vivid and imaginative demons dragging victims to their fate. Typical of the style of the day, the demons are modeled after terrestrial animals, like an unholy perversion of nature. Huddled in oven-like caves are other victims as a few are goaded to the top of a cliff where a demon tosses them into a black ocean. A huge wheel rotates in the distance, an allusion to some form of torture and death similar to medieval tactics. The sky buzzes with flying

Let the nightmare continue! Here is another detail from Hieronymus Bosch's beautiful work, The Garden of Earthly Delights. It does actually have a lot of beauty but I've been mostly showing details of Bosch's more nightmarish elements. Maybe in the future I will post some details from other parts of the paintings. Anyway here we have a figure called "The Prince of Hell," sitting on an object that may be a toilet or a throne, depending on who you ask. This towering bird-headed monster is gorging himself on human corpses (which seem to be farting out black gasses and ravens), which he poops out through a hole in his throne/toilet. He's wearing

Hieronymus Bosch is my favorite painter. His works are something like a gothic nightmare of the death and madness taking over the world. For instance, check out this detail from one of his paintings, Garden of Earthly Delights. The contrast between bright lights unnaturally piercing the gloom and the prevailing shadowed silhouettes that hide most of the details is just amazing. Even without the level of detail you see in other parts of his paintings (see my last journal entry for some of that) what you see here is terrifying. Humans forced into slavish labor in fiery conditions or on narrow catwalks above abysmal heights. Armies of the undead