BEAUTY: Photography--Margriet Smulders

Margriet Smulders' photographic work is both enchanting and ominous. For inspiration, this Dutch artist surely draws upon the saturated, chiaroscuro work of Dutch masters of the past but her abstract, contemporary still life compositions are rendered in lurid color. She shoots flowers, fruit, greenery, and branches on mirrors full of water, milk, and ink. The effect is a verdant, throbbing, dripping, bosky sense that seems about to tip into withering, rotting, decomposing territory. This tension makes her work immediate and vital.

Top to bottom: Leda; Which wounded Bossoms fits; Zoenoffer/Sacrifica; Itaparica; Tulips for Rembrandt I; Heaven it's a Place I

http://www.margrietsmulders.nl/

BEAUTY: Art--Suzanne Falk

The realist/surrealist tableaux that painter Suzanne Falk creates are amazing. Looking like some kind of childhood fever dream from anywhere between 1939 and 1964, they are chock full of children's books, diaper pins with little plastic cartoon animal heads, colorful glass marbles, vintage ceramic figurines, children's plastic squeak toys, and candy (hello, Peeps!). By evoking a certain era of pop culture and toys, she evokes attitudes toward childhood, a certain attitude toward the world, and an overall sense of naiveté that infused the early to mid part of the twentieth century.

She is also partial--as am I--to vintage motel and restaurant signage. The graphics and fonts can be so classic. Her work speaks to a by-gone era of the joy of "motor travel" and the start of the "Space Age" in the 50s, when the United States was booming, the future seemed full of promise, and that better living through science was inevitable.

Top to bottom: Canary In The Coal Mine; March Of The Innocent; The Color of Love; The Day Bunny Fell In Love With Squirrel; The Defenders Of Sweet Dreams; Forest Of Dreams; Away From It All; High Atop The Desert Gem; Into U; The Inn Crowd; This Is The Space Age; Top Of The World

http://www.suzannefalk.com/index.php
http://suzannefalk.tumblr.com/

Over ten years ago now, I took a picture in central Florida of a motel sign featuring a diving bather, like Falk's Into U.

Photo by JEF