Goya’s Saturn Devours Streeborama.

Welcome back to another installment of Streeborama here on Mutantville.com.  This time out I thought I would share something near and dear to my heart and that is the quest to discover the way to express true art and true horror to the world around me.  I’ve decided to share a classic work of art with you all to illustrate how I go about my own personal quest of self discovery.  For those of you that are unfamiliar with this work – this is one of the infamous Black Paintings by Francisco Goya entitled “Saturn Devouring His Son.”

(Read the rest after the leap if you dare!)

According to legend, Fancisco Goya had been left deaf after contracting a horrible fever in 1792 and at the ripe age of 73 began painting a series of oil paintings directly onto the walls of his home in Quinta del Sordo on the banks of the Manzanares.  These disturbing and haunting images known as the Black Paintings were never commissioned nor meant to be seen by anyone outside of Goya’s home.

These works are significant to horror storytellers because they seem to tap into some Otherworld of darkness and violence with little concern for adhering to the trappings of physical reality and representations as we know them.  These were dark, haunting, violent images

dredged up from the depths of Goya’s subconscious and given life by the feverish spark in his brain which in turn birthed these images into the world on the walls of his home.  It has been suggested that Goya may have been inspired by the work of Peter Paul Rubens’ 1636 painting of the same name – but that is a much more conventional representation of the Saturn myth with lifelike classical images that more accurately represent the world as we see it.

In comparing the two images we see Goya’s brilliance and his madness.  In a recent documentary about Stanley Kubrick entitled A Life In Pictures, actor Jack Nicholson recounted an artistic philosophy given to him by Stanley Kubrick.  Kubrick informed him that the filmmaker’s responsibility is “not to photograph reality but to make a photograph of the photograph.”  This concept should be given thought and contemplation by all artists and in Goya’s Saturn we see this represented in full demented force.

Goya’s Saturn depicts the horrifying image of the dark god Saturn eating one of his sons.  The head is missing and one of the arms has already been devoured.  The way the entire tableau of terror is depicted is disturbing because the figures’ anatomy has been slightly distorted and the entire image has the quality of being looked at through the lens of a nightmare.  This is what it means to photograph the photograph.

All too often, artists and filmmakers alike forget that we as artists are not here to show the public the world as they know it – but to show them the world as they’ve never seen it before.  Alan Moore likened this responsibility to that of being a modern shaman with a responsibility to help society see the world in a new way.  The great Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky reminds us that his films are not a medicine for society – but a poison – to kill it.

I am sharing these images and philosophies with you to remind you, my fellow artists and filmmakers, of our responsibilities.  Shun the sunlit world and eschew realistic representations.  Take up your pen, brush or camera and capture something truly horrifying.  Ignore reality and embrace your dreams – or in the case of horror – embrace your nightmares.  Spill them out into the world and give us something to fear again.  This is the challenge that I have taken up and I challenge you to do the same.