Carafe Art by Moi and Visionary Edgar Ende
Interesting connection to The Neverending Story, a favorite film
More early art by me. I like putting these up, it lets me see how far I’ve come since I started. Now, if I could just crawl out of these anxiety doldrums and hit the easel again! One of my fellow retiree painters said she finished 36 paintings in 2023. Geez, I need to put the pedal to the medal, it’s almost February!
After my first several still life paintings of food, I decided to branch out a bit and try something hard. And I set up a doozy. Hoisted on my own petard. (In case you had a twitch to go down that rabbit hole, I’ll save you some searching - here you go. )
A petard is, or rather was, as they have long since fallen out of use, a small engine of war used to blow breaches in gates or walls. They were originally metallic and bell-shaped but later cubical wooden boxes. Whatever the shape, the significant feature was that they were full of gunpowder - basically what we would now call a bomb.
And I thought this was hilarious! The French have the word 'péter' - to fart, which it's hard to imagine is unrelated. Petar was part of the everyday language around that time, as in this rather colourful line from Zackary Coke in his work Logick, 1654: "The prayers of the Saints ascending with you, will Petarr your entrances through heavens Portcullis". Umm, not exactly as I’d pictured the pearly gates, but I like the human humor of it.
Well, my painting started out as a bit of a Petarr, don’t you think? I put together a mug, a metallic coffee carafe - there was my fatal error, cherry metal - and a cloth napkin on wood. I was in love with the shadow of the handle on the wall.
I think I repainted the mug about ten times trying to get the curve and handle correct. Take a close look at the finished painting, that mug is so thick I could pull it off the page and set it on the table. It’s practically sculpture. But I was SUPER happy with the napkin, it’s very Cezanne.
My art teacher called me a painter of light. I never got it until I saw how my eye and paintbrush connected to the colors and reflection on the plastic part of the top of the carafe. Light IS important - where it hits, how it changes the color and almost becomes tactile if I paint it like my eye sees it (black, gray and green) rather than going on what my brain tells me (solid black).
ANYWAY, on to our artist. It sounds like he used a type of meditation to come up with his painting subjects. They’re dream-like - restful and disturbing at the same time. Sort of like Dali without the ego. Or Magritte without the sly humor. Bonus - his son wrote The Neverending Story, one of my favorites.
Edgar Karl Alfons Ende ( 1901 – 1965) was a "visionary" painter. He created the motives for his paintings totally free out of his inner self, without paying attention to styles and contents that were "en vogue" at a certain time. The artist withdrew to a darkroom, where he, first of all interrupting the logical thread of his thoughts, created a state of purposeless and non-wilful alertness that caused pictures of extreme sharpness and clarity, which the artist could in no way change at all, to appear in his head. Edgar Ende would usually come back with a pad full of sketches. Not all of them would become complete pictures. The sketches were archived and looked at again after some time, after months or even years
Ende attended the Altona School of Arts and Crafts from 1916 to 1920. In 1922 he married Gertrude Strunck, but divorced four years later. He remarried in 1929, the same year his son Michael was born. In the 1930s Ende's Surrealist paintings began to attract considerable critical attention, but were then condemned as degenerate by the Nazi government. Beginning in 1936 the Nazis forbade him to continue to paint - he is denied the coupon for painting materials by the Reichskulturkammer (Nazi authority in charge of culture and the arts) - or exhibit his work. In 1940 he was conscripted into the Luftwaffe as an operator of anti-aircraft artillery.
"In the meantime the war had started. On Christmas 1940, I had my call-up and had to report for duty as a recruit at the tank artillery in Bonn one day after New Year. Here I was to suffer the worst time of my life. It was horrible as an introvert person to be suddenly dragged outwards, as a respected man to be abused in the usual Prussian commanding tone."
The majority of his paintings were destroyed by a bomb raid on Munich in 1944, making his surviving pre-war work extremely rare. "How does an artist cope with the fact that almost 70 percent of his work are destroyed? (…) Michael Ende: "Indeed, that was hard for him. Those were real blows for him. But in a strange way he was not very attached to his pictures. I mean, usually he was only interested in his pictures as long as he was working on them ".
In 1951, Ende met the recognized founder of Surrealism, André Breton, who admired his work and declared him an official Surrealist. He continued to paint surrealist works until his death in 1965 of a myocardial infarction.
Ende's paintings are thought to have had a significant influence on his son's writing. This is inferred in the scenes depicting the surreal dream-paintings from Yor's Minroud in Die Unendliche Geschichte (The Neverending Story). Michael Ende also wrote Der Spiegel im Spiegel (The mirror in the mirror), a collection of short stories based on (and printed alongside) Edgar Ende's surrealist works.
I would love to know the meaning and symbolism of the egg on the throne. It’s my favorite, I see a little whimsy there. Carl Jung would have a field day with this guy. You can see the huge influence on his son’s writings. Take a look at the trailer for The Neverending Story. Some of those big head paintings came to life! It’s an 80s flick without a lot of good special effects, but it has a certain charm. Great stories always survive.