080316 – Sanctuary – Hieronymus Bosch

It is impossible to be impassive when confronted by the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. The images within each painting are at once otherworldly and fantastical but slowly and surely they will eventually become disturbing. They are images created beyond the reach of the normal imagination, images of the possessed, images that question the realms of sanity, its boundaries and parameters. We cannot look at the paintings without trying to envision the man that created them. Trying to see the world through his eyes, understand his beliefs, his values, his rules or his concepts of reality. There are many good painters of the fantastical but their paintings are products of intellect and as such they can always be rationalized, explained and decoded. Imagination is an act of the intellect, it can be turned on and off and controlled The world of Bosch cannot be turned off. It is a constant embedded in his very being. He eats with it, sleeps with it, it watches him and waits for him. Bosch lived these paintings, they were his world, his reality, you can feel it, sense it in every tortured event painstakingly depicted upon the canvass. These events were experienced either in the conscience or the sub-conscience. The paintings are a diary of one mans beliefs and the pictures are read sequentially as a series of events over a period of time. Everything Bosch stood for is set out naked on the canvass, brutalised, afflicted, persecuted and punished. The paintings are a self-confession that haunts to this day and when viewed one questions the limits of ones own reality.

The Surrogate Twin