The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel — A grotesque image of an ogre shooting an arrow into another creature’s rear. A nun plucks penises off a phallus tree. A bizarre hybrid examining someone else’s hindquarters. And rabbits conducting a funeral procession. Medieval society wasn’t all about prayers and plagues. The printing press hadn’t been invented yet and…

Do you think The Kiss is sexually provocative? — By 1897, radical artists in Vienna started disrupting traditional arts and culture. Artists and intellectuals, including Gustav Klimt, architect Otto Wagner, composers Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg, and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud challenged academic art and started associating themselves with progressive art styles like Art Nouveau. This was the rise of…

The transformation to a trillion-dollar company — An illustration created waves in the technology realm in 2011. One reason was that it featured the top tech companies of that period. But the main reason was the illustration of Microsoft, it caught more eyeballs than the rest. A group of pyramidal-shaped organizational hierarchies with one leader at the…

Deconstructing the reasons behind Michelangelo’s “men with breasts” — Michelangelo wrote in one of his poems, “I’m ugly.” He believed he did not meet societal beauty standards. Despite this, he spent his entire life in pursuit of sublime perfection. Michelangelo’s David is indeed the most perfect statue in the world. …

Did she use cats for her alter ego? — Months ago, I discovered a surrealist artist online that I am really proud of. I wrote an article about her and I highly recommend reading the article before continuing with this one. Remedios Varo — the lost surrealist! The Female Surrealist You Probably Don’t Know About Remedios Varo — the lost surrealistmedium.com Her art is eccentric and contemporary, making Varo a complete badass woman.

Surrealism, psychedelia and AI inspired imprints — Have you ever heard of the artist Mati Klarwein? Well, he was way ahead of his times. His art is bold, unconventional and controversial. I recently stumbled upon one of his paintings Annunciation on Reddit and I swear it knocked my eyes out. From da Vinci to Caravaggio, every prominent…

Aesthetics, detail and life-size portraits — Last week, my husband went on an office trip to Manchester. When he visited the Manchester Art gallery, he called me and showed this gigantic painting titled The Shadow of Death by William Holman Hunt. The painting mesmerized me, and I ended up looking more about this artist and his…

The harrowing experiences of sexually abused women — Zdzislaw Beksinski and Francis Bacon come to my mind when we talk about dark and macabre art. Beksinski was a Polish artist whose paintings were filled with elements of dystopia and doomsday. He faced antisemitism and witnessed mass killings of Jews. While Bacon sketched his broken and fragile relationships on…

A deep dive into the rebel artist — Caravaggio was born in Milan. In his early twenties, he travelled to Rome, where he was offered many art commissions from affluent patrons. Unlike other artists who employed idealism in their paintings, Caravaggio preferred naturalism and used live models to create unprecedented psychological drama and realism in his works. It…