Artist Blog: Hieronymus Bosch

(Posted in May from saved draft)

Hieronymus Bosch was an Early Netherlandish painter who used fantastic imagery in his work to illustrate religious and moral ideals in a narrative approach. He lived from 1450-1516.

An example of one of his sketches:

The Tree Man. Hieronymus Bosch, 1470s. Pen and bistre on paper. Vienna, Austria. http://www.abcgallery.com/B/bosch/bosch.html.

I've spoken to Tom and my father (who's a painter) about this artist several times because I'm so encapsulated by the things I've seen in these paintings. It is so odd and interesting to find this artist with such vivid surrealist imagery from that time period, and the fact that it's associated to religion makes a lot of sense to me. My favorite part of going to Saint Gertrude High School was learning about all the strange stories in the Bible. I'm not a religious person by any means, so my belief lies on art, love and humanity. My most ritual and meditative state to reflect on life is when I'm making art, and I feel like maybe it was one of Bosch's religious rituals as well. I guess we'll never know.

There's so much information on Bosch that I'm making the focus of this post specifically on his piece Garden of Earthly Delights.

Garden of Earthly Delights (Triptych), Heironymus Bosch, c.1510. Oil on panel. (In the Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.) http://www.abcgallery.com/B/bosch/bosch.html.

Seen above, Garden of Earthly Delights, is among his most famous paintings, although its original title was never recovered. This triptych depicts 'Paradise' on the left panel (with Adam and Eve and many strange animals), the 'Earthly Delights' in the middle panel (with several nude figures and magnificent birds and foods), and 'Hell' on the right panel (with illustrations sinners experiencing extravagant punishments). The backs of the exterior panels are painted so that when you close them you see a God creating the Earth.

Bosch's remarkable ability to create and build this extremely intricate landscape encourages me to keep building my own landscapes for my shoots with more detail. With over a thousand figures depicted in this piece, he uses a series of exaggerations and distortions to make his subjects fantastical. I plan to do this in post production in Photoshop, not to such extremes, but I guess it's the modern day fantastical approach.

There's a lot of incentive to start creating multi-fantastical sets now, so get ready to see some progress!

http://www.abcgallery.com/B/bosch/bosch.html

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/B/bosch.html