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| Gavriil Pavlovich Kondratenko, Moonlit Winter Evening with Solitary Figure, 1903 |
If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog that needs updating. Older posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts and reflections on reality and knowledge have menu pages above.
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This is a short post that isn't part of any of the ongoing series, but responds to something interesting that came up elsewhere. In a way, it's part of all the series, because it has to do with making sense - "reading" - images.
And it may become the start of a new one.
The Band is built off the idea that images are information vectors as well as aesthetic experiences - both, not either/or. In this post, we are going to look at a pair of images that complement each other and explain how they communicate their complementary messages.
But before getting into that it is necessary to address some basic points around art. These have come up in regular posts, but those are long and the scattered points aren't always easy to pull together or link to. And it's worth taking stock of why art matters and why the enemies of the West have tried to take it from us.
Franz Marc, Small Composition II, 1914, color on canvas, Sprengel Museum
Lawrence Weiner, Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole, 1991, by laser-cut aluminum typography on brick. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
It also puts us at odds with Postmodernism and its aftermaths, which falsely claimed that aesthetics aren't part of "art" since they don't exist and are racist or something.
This pretentious garbage is typical output from the sort of artworld creature that lives off the teats of govenrments, debased unaccountable institutions, and globalist "foundations". Apparently it's "meta" because it's a stenciled message you can put anywhere that describes the creative process...
These bodies gatekeep Art! with no checks other than their own perverse hatred of truth and beauty. They don't even talk like normal people, preferring a stilted, meaningless "discourse" that marks a place in their human centipede. Click for an example referring to the crap on the left.
Look past the atavists and the reality is that the visual arts are a subset of imagery. All visual arts are images, but not all images are art. The Modernists and Postmodernists are right to point out that this distinction is arbitrary. But they're morons and or liars because they believe that that observation somehow matters. All language is arbitrary in that it assigns unrelated phonemes or graphemes to concepts and objects.
Even the word "arbitrary" is an arbitrary assignment. Why on earth should we care if the term "art" is as well? It's dishonest to even pretend this is noteworthy.
But why single art out for a dishonest criticism. It's a puzzler. Might it have something to do with a desire to destroy standards and replace it them with anti-human cultural poison?
All human activity is arbitrary in that we choose forms and set hierarchies of meaning. We pick names, colors, sizes, and lay-outs - designation and distinction are essential building blocks for the civilizations that allowed us to live better than animals. We can think of the civilizing process of as a ongoing clarifying and refinement that began when the first person named the first thing.
The reverse of drawing distinctions is entropy. Chaotic goo where communication and understanding dissolve into a meaningless pink slime. When you look past the specifics to the underlying pattern, this is what the atavistic inhuman globalist left - call them SJWs - want. They oppose enculturation and the refinement of meaning that comes with it. They desire entropic chaos where protoplasm twitch to subjective stimuli. The fact that without the distinctions and refinements of civilization the protoplasm die horribly escapes them because they're stupid. And their position is fundamentally evil.
Maerten de Vos, God Creating the Birds and the Fishes, 1600-1602, oil on copper.
From a Biblical perspective, Creation is a series of distinctions and designations. Drawing boundaries and defining things. And why do the designated things look the way they do? Why, it's arbitrary!
Innovation and artistic creation express the divine impulse in us and put us in the footsteps of God. Materially of course. When we build on the creations that came before, we advance refinement, diminish chaos and reduce indeterminacy. And we do so in ways that are constrained by the laws of nature, but are otherwise arbitrary. The morality of our creations is a separate thing.
A generically altered bioweapon designed for stealth transmission and maximal impact on health care and economic systems is a creation. It's innovative, but not moral.
For artistic creation, specific media may come and go and choices differ culturally and contextually. This is the part that is "arbitrary" in the sense that preferring tapestry to mosaic or stained glass to wall painting are issues of taste. But what matters for civilization isn't what arts are chosen but that there are specific arts. That there are skilled processes for creative distinction, refinement, and sophistication. And this is not arbitrary, unless you consider elevating our quality of life above the savage state to be so as well. It is the necessary expression of cultural refinement, of pushing away chaos, entropy, and indeterminate slime with divine creation. On that level, it is a moral imperative.
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, A Collection of Pictures at the Time of Augustus, 1867, oil on canvas
Alma-Tadema was an academic artist best known for melodramatic scenes of ancient Greece and Rome. But he was an excellent technician. This painting captures the important place of art in ancient Roman culture.
Every healthy civilization and many unhealthy ones express themselves and their values through the visual arts. Out current situation, where our "art" aggressively opposes our culture, our standards, and our identities is utterly bizarre. It is hard to think of another example.
Kalachakra Shambhala, 19th century, Buddhist thangka painting from Sera Monastery, Tibet, private collection
Even cultures with abstract art traditions use them to express their values and identities. This picture diagrams the Kalachakra Shambhala - the final stage on an inner search for a new awareness of the world in Tibetan Buddhism.
It isn't a realistic depiction of something in the world, but it doesn't spit on the culture where it came from either.
One Postmodern trick is to ask what art is, then pretend the impossibility of providing a concise and definitive answer disproves the concept. All liars have are tricks in the end, but they can be effective if you're unaware of them. The reality is that art takes on many forms and roles - even in the West, let alone the world - and there is no concise answer that will sum up everything you see in a major museum. But that's the trick - the correct definition of "art" is conceptual, not a list of art forms. And the answer is easy - art is structured making according to cultural norms. If you want something more specific, you have to refine the question.
Bertel Thorvaldsen, Gravestone of Poniński's Children, 1842, marble, Gallery of Art in Lviv, Ukraine
Like what is a sculpture, or relief sculpture, or Neoclassical relief, or funerary art, etc.
Art is a higher order term with a lot of constituent subsets. Precise definitions are subset-dependent.
Since the Band writes from a Western perspective, we are considering a Western notion of art. We've found that a definition based off a set of Greek terms best fits the art of the West on the broad level. This isn't perfect - definitions never are - but it captures the main assumptions from antiquity to the dawn of Modernism in the "art world" and still fits what the non-retarded and morally healthy tend to think art should be today.If you're interested in the reasoning behind these, click for a link to the post this was worked out. But this recap of the basics are enough for this purpose.
Art isn't either the making or the ideals being expressed - it is the coming together of the two in a visible material form. The Greeks used the term techne for skilled craft and episteme for the higher truths that art communicated. Art itself is phronesis - the marriage of the two. It looks like this:
Techne is skilled craft. It’s material-level on the ontological hierarchy, and follows culturally-specific customs rather than universal rules. The key is that it is skilled. Art isn't easy - it's talent refined to mastery. Otherwise you get the modernism where a perverse "art world" anoints talentless dyscivic garbage.
Episteme refers to higher abstract principles - the metaphysical ideals that a culture holds most important and that are immaterial. Truth, Beauty and the Good. These don't change.
Phronesis is the coming together of the two - techne guided by, serving, and expressing episteme in artistic form. This is the art of the West. Technical skill to express abstract values.
What makes this definition so good is that it can distinguish art from "craft" or "skilled labor". Since the purpose of art is to communicate episteme in material terms, which is different from the purposes of craft objects. Both require refined skill or techne and be aesthetically pleasing but craft has a primary functional purpose other than purely communicating episteme in some way.
The formula:
The formula:
This is so effective because it combines several key ingredients in a concise formation. Modern simpletons dislike this because it means entertaining more than one thought at a time. But art is a refined cultural activity and as such, consists of more than "orange man bad" level linear idiocy. First, there has to be the idea of a higher principle or truth. The image can be negative, but it needs to be truthful on some level.
Vasily Vereshchagin, The Apotheosis of War, 1871, oil on canvas, 127 × 197 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
It's not an attractive picture, but it is truthful. It's skillfully made - techne - and conveys truth - episteme - so it is art.
Then there is the idea of skilled making - the most obvious casualty of the satanic inversions and applied idiocy of the modern era. Again, art types are cultural preference, but regardless of what types are preferred, they have to be skillfully made. Skilled making in the service of truth is a requirement of worldly beauty.
The Band refers to visual attraction without the higher principles of episteme as allure. Allure can be amoral - neutral subjective pleasure - but it won't be moral because if it were, it would channel epistome and become beauty. More often than not it's immoral - visual seduction that plays on emotional response to draw one onto a dark path.
Alexandre Cabanel, Albaydé, 1848, oil on canvas, Fabre Museum
Cabanel's picture is rich in techne - the fall of the garments, the exotic setting, the creamy skin, and seductive insouciance of the expression are signs of a master painter. But there is no episteme to speak of, other than perhaps the appeal of the female form. But even that is presented in a tawdry way - the figure is a herem girl or courtesan. The only purpose other than the display of techne is to stimulate emotional desires - base feelings that may be "true" in a hormonal sense, but not in a higher one. It lacks logos.
Perhaps that is sufficient - there are shades of gray in qualitative judgments. But the painting is more alluring than beautiful. It has its value perhaps, but as ornament, a moment of seductive pleasure rather than "art" in the purest sense.
This is why techne alone is not sufficient to define art. Allure and seduction also require high level craft skills. It's the presence of episteme that separates the art of the West from pretty pictures.
To clarify, this is a broad generation. The material-level truths of human existence cover a lot of ground - everything from Biblical revelations to natural processes, to human relations. But the litmus test is simple:
The history of the arts of the West include many forms, but traditionally, painting is probably the preeminent one. The versitility and nuance of painting gave it a wider range of effects, subject matter, and contexts than any other art form. Because of this, the West developed more sophisticated attitudes and refined understanding of painting than any other art form. The history of painting almost is the history of post-Medieval art in the West, with a wing for sculpture and another for the rest of the arts. But even there, painting set the stage.
Media like collage or embroidery were thought of in painted terms.
Louis Comfort Tiffany, Landscape with a Greek Temple, around 1900, stained glass window, Cleveland Museum of Art
Mehitable Starkey, Embroidered Chair Back, 1755-65, linen embroidered with wool and silk threads, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
This is because art in the West represents things, and painting is the most versatile and sophisticated representational tool. Art doesn't have to be realistic, but it does have to be representative on some level if it is going to convey episteme through techne. A Gothic cathedral isn't a depiction, but it conveys the material logos of it's construction and abstract logos about beauty and the glory of God through its arrangement and impact on the viewer. But depiction is the easiest and most direct way to communicate visually, and painting is best at that. Which is why most painted art depicts something recognizable.
John Atkinson Grimshaw, November, 1879, oil on canvas, private collection
The range and nuance of the power of painting to depict things comes through in a technical virtuoso master of expression like Grimshaw. His incredible moonlit skies, varied light sources, and textured foregrounds are testimonials to the ability of oil paint to represent.
One of the most diabolical aspects of modernism was the notion of autonomy [click for a post]. This is the false premise that art has no purpose other than to be art. That it exists in complete isolation from any function or expectation other than itself - paint on a surface, form in space, in a disconnected cultural space called art. Even after Postmodernism restored the idea that art represents things, it kept it locked in the stunted, self-referential discourse of "art" and focused on perverse "critiques" of the culture and history of the West.
On the surface, autonomy seems simply retarded, but we've come to realize a more diabolical purpose. Consider: the art of the West is purposeful, but the purpose is to express episteme - abstract truths that aren't obvious in the world around us.
Sanford Robinson Gifford, A Gorge in the Mountains (Kauterskill Clove), 1862, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art
This can be explicitly spiritual. But it can also be as basic as the truth of natural beauty shining from creation and the healthiness of man's place in it. Logos in a material sense.
Gifford, like Grimshaw above, made art that made us aware of the wonders of the world around us with ideal visions of what that could be. The beauty comes from the ordered perfection that is implicit in the natural world, but rarely seen directly.
Carl Bloch, The Daughter of Jairius, 1863, oil on canvas, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
A picture like this one wears its truths - faith, salvation, and the actual Logos - openly. Bloch depicts the moment before the miracle to capture the sorrow and loss. Jesus' arrival in the background is electrifying.
"Autonomy" eliminates all of this - even the logos-free allure of the Cabanal. It cuts art off from it's most essential cultural function - manifesting the True, the Beautiful. and the Good in visible, meaningful forms. Autonomy bars us from what has always been an essential vector for encoding wisdom, values, aesthetics, and discernment, and replaced it with hideous idiocy. Viewing art shifts from perceiving logos through phronesis to an act of humiliation - the self-abasement of capering around rooms filled with detritus while degenerate blurbs and audio guides tell you what to like. In other words, licking the globalist hand as it slaps away your fundamental identity.
Atrium of Daniel Libeskind's Museum of Contemporary Art in Milan.
Postmodern architectural darling designs a house of trash.
Because Italy lacks decent art to look at...
Simply calling artistic autonomy retarded sells this way short. It is evil. Pure satanic inversion of the bedrock identity of the art of the West. Representation, communication - enculturation - are not aspects of art, they're fundamentals. The reason for its existence. Without this purpose, there is no art.
Julius Klever, Winter Evening in the Forest, 1897, private collection, oil on canvas
Like the connection between people and the land by a Russian artist. Globalist filth deny the reality culture in order to transform people into fungible units of debt and consumption. A painting that communicates the logos of a unique identity based on shared experience opposes that.
That's why globalists are evil - they're satanic liars who invert what it true for personal gain.
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1808, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum
Or the civilizing message of the triumph of reason over animal savagery that's the subject of this mythic scene by an academic painter. The Sphinx is a murderous beast with a perverse nature signified by her hybrid form. Contrasted with the well-formed Oedipus, she embodies the violation of distinctions and boarders that reduces life-preserving civilization to primordial chaos.
Globalists wish to invert the logos of civilization and reduce us to manipulable pink slime - it's clear in their endless attacks on clear definitions and differentiation. A painting that reiterates reasoned clarity and distinction over bestial emotion and whim opposes this.
The art of the West is the opposite of autonomous - if it were autonomous, it would cease to be the art of the West. Which is what has happened in the sham "art world" of today. The irony is that modernists decry the so-called arbitrary standards of the past while dishonestly promoting the most arbitrary perspective of all - a meaningless bubble filled with talentless hacks, self-promoting sociopathic liars, and money-launderers trying to outdo each other in praise of garbage. It's hard to imagine something more purposelessly arbitrary than that.
Its no surprise that the wicked invert reality, then project that inversion on the targets of their wickedness...
William Blake, Eve Tempted by the Serpent, 1799-1800, tempera and gold on copper, Victoria and Albert Museum
...they learned from their master.
In reality, artistic forms are culturally arbitrary, but the purpose is not. Art communicates truth visually by showing us things that we can't see in everyday life. But because of the modernist assault on our heritage and identity, many don't know how to see the communications. They don't know how to read or hear what art has to say. And worse than that, they're so turned off of art in general by the modernist-globalist-luciferian garbage surrounding it that they'll never look closely enough to figure it out.
The pretension, moral ugliness, and dishonesty of the modern art "scene" and the self-abasement needed to subscribe to its nonsense make it a non-starter for most. Healthy people tend to avoid weird creeps and liars. Then the historical art that actually is appealing gets buried under the discursive blather from the same. And things like this go unnoticed:
Johan Christian Dahl, View of Dresden by Moonlight, 1839, oil on canvas, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
Imagine if the art appreciation types really put the full scope of the beauty of the West against the Modernist hacks?
This site was the first hit on a duckduckgo "art appreciation" search. Notice how talentless modern garbage predominates on their landing page. They're typical for the way the conventional modern institutional definition of art is simply taken at face value and presented as fact. Great works and trash are put side by side as if they share anything beyond designation by anti-human globalist freaks. There's no mention of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. There's no consideration of the relationship between art, culture, and values. Just the mindless parroting of the atavists, poseurs, and frauds that choke our institutions like the plaque in a diseased artery. We aren't singling them out for criticism - they're simply an example of what passes for "art appreciation" in the cultural cesspool that is Art!
Here's a question:
The answer is obviously that you can't. Which is why you'll get nonsense descriptions of movements and the importance of technical terminology and nothing about communication. How artworks encode logos in appealing visual forms that can make the soul soar. Nothing about how those techniques arrange that wisdom for emphasis and reliability. Nothing about the interplay of the old Aristotelian terms of dialectic and rhetoric, or pathos, logos, and ethos in lines and colors. In short, nothing to let you connect with the real artistic heritage of the West and let it show you what we are, where we came from, and where we need to go.
The Band came together to fight back against the lies. Since then, it's become apparent that reconnecting people with their artistic and cultural heritage is a major component. This is a big project - what is peddled as "art" needs to be completely reconsidered in light of logos. Modern history needs to be scrapped altogether and a reality-facing alternative set up in its place. How to look at, understand, and yes, appreciate art needs to be built from the ground up.
Jonas Lie, The Old Ships Draw to Home Again, around 1920, oil on canvas, Brooklyn Museum
A history where 20th century art actually relates to the life, people, and culture of the time rather than theoretical nonsense and talentless hackery.
Aleksandr Averin, Walk #3, around 2017, oil on canvas
And contemporary art is distinguished by mastery of techne and the logos of beauty - of both nature and human nature.
This isn't going to happen overnight, or through the work of one small site. But we can start.
With that in mind, this post will look closely at two pictures as a demonstration of what art says and how it says it. It won't be the systematic, ground-up, "how to read a picture" that needs to happen - that's a project that will unfold over time, and will involve other platforms as well. But it is a start. And once you start thinking about what art says, you become empowered to read other pictures, make your own judgments, reject the cultural emasculation of the liars and globalists, and begin to wake up to the incredible heritage that you're part of.
A new dawn. Sort of like this:
Frederic Edwin Church, Coast Scene, Mount Desert (Sunrise off the Maine Coast), 1863, oil on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT
The two pictures that we're going to look at are an uncommon pair. One came from the daily paintings that the Band posts elsewhere and the other was contributed by an ally and associate. Both were popular, but come from different periods and address very different subjects. They share Slavic origins but it is unlikely that they have any direct connection beyond that. But this is the difference between reading paintings and building histories of style or defining movements - the direct connections matter much less than the logos that shines through them. Once you can see that, the entirety of Western art opens up to you.
What they do do is communicate opposite messages in similar ways.
Gavriil Pavlovich Kondratenko, Moonlit Winter Evening with Solitary Figure, 1903
Pre-Communist Russian painting is fascinating. It shows some influence of European movements like Romanticism and Impressionism, but had a unique quality that we can call fantastical realism. That is, realistic art with a fantastical quality.
It is especially good at capturing the feel of the land and the relationship of the people with it. See the Klever painting up above for another example. Not surprising, considering the size of the rugged Russian landscape, but other places were quicker to toss their heritages for modernist lies.
This painting is impressionistic in its grainy blurry quality but doesn't share the Impressionist interest in making images out of color dots. What it does is capture the feel and beauty of a bright moonlit snowy night where the noises are muffled and edges blurry. The light in the church is the point of warmth that draws the traveler forward.
Our second picture is an untitled piece often called the Valley of Death or of the Dead by a Polish master of surrealistic hellscapes. The dimensions of the painting are such that we can't fit a large version with text beside it given Blogger's format constraints, so we'll introduce it, then blow it up into a larger view after.
Zdzislaw Beksinski, Unntitled, 1972
The Band generally dislikes Beksinski's work. He's a skilled technician, but wallows in horror and depravity in the nihilistic "moral vacuity of modern life" cliche that isn't so much wrong as a dead end. Endlessly pointing out how vile the contemporary world is quickly crosses over into debasement porn without starting to show a way forward. At the same time, he did live through the Communist system and was knifed to death by a teenage "friend" looking for money, so it is possible that his hellish visions were true to his inner life. But this isn't that.
Untitled is an excellent depiction of hope and resolve in a dark world. The monstrous figures loom but don't threaten, leaving a clear path without a clear beginning or end. Crows circle, but the figure moved forward, guided by the brightest light in the scene.
Here is the large-scale view for comparison with the Kondratenko. Note the lighting - it also only illuminates vague forms, but it is more monochrome and has no obvious source. Just a grim haze that recalls distant fires reflecting off an ashen sky. It's the light of pyres or hell - the opposite of the pure light of the moon on fresh snow.
We should note that Beksinski denies giving meaning to his works: "Meaning is meaningless to me. I do not care for symbolism and I paint what I paint without medating on a story." But art expresses the world that it is drawn from. If the artist wishes to include explicit meanings, that's great. But it isn't necessary for insight to be communicated to us.
So why look at these together? What makes them jump out? First, look at the overall compositions. Both feature solitary walkers, single points of light, and diagonal pathways through uncertain terrain. Composition or arrangement is how the paintings are put together. Not the materials used, but how the elements in the picture are arranged or composed. It's like music or writing that way. There are many ways to organize a scene, and how the artist does so determines not only what it looks like aesthetically, but how you will understand it conceptually.
Rembrandt, Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer, 1653, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Here, Rembrandt obscures the background to push your attention onto the figure and the bust. The diagonal light connects them and especially illuminate's Aristotle's face to enhance the impression that the great mind is deep in thought. Dressing the philosopher in 17th-century clothing made him more accessible to Rembrandt's contemporary audience.
Composition is a huge part of a meaning - a reflection on the legacy of the classical tradition that the West was built on.
Consider two versions of the same scene from eminent academic painters. They depict the moment when the great Roman poet Virgil was reading his masterpiece to the Emperor Augustus and his family and referenced the death of the emperor's nephew Marcellus. Augustus' sister Octavia, Marcellus' mother who was devastated by the death of her son, faints at his mention. The emperor's second wife Livia was married to him for over 50 years but they had no children. She was accused of having Marcellus killed so her children from her first marriage would become heirs to the throne, though the rumors were never proven.
Angelica Kauffman, Virgil reading the Aeneid to Augustus and Octavia, 1788, oil on canvas, Hermitage Museum
Kauffman was a rare female history painter and a founding member of the British Royal Academy whose art is defined by Neolassical clarity.
She depicts a moment of dramatic action, rushing to the aid of fainting Octavia, while Livia looks reproachfully at the somewhat worried poet.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Virgil Reading from the Aeneid, 1864, oil on canvas, private collection
Ingres was president of the French Academy and combined Classical and Romantic themes on the way to becoming the preeminent artist of his day.
He downplays the physical action to focus on the psychological intensity of the scene. Augustus locks eyes on Virgil and commands him to stop while to advisors communicate nervously behind him. The focus in on the poet and emperor while between them Livia sits unconcerned beneath the statue of Marcellus, emphasizing the crux of the drama. The lighting ratchets up the emotional tension, while Kauffman uses more natural illumination to create a more realistic scene.
This is how composition determines the nature of the story you're seeing. The position and interaction of the figures, the expressions and gestures, the light and color, even their locations in space all shape the viewer's experience. Both pictures depict the same moment and are carefully structured with figures locking together into integrated groups. This allows both to show this as a Classical ideal rather than a random snapshot - you can see the conscious thought that went into the planning. But one opts for action, the other for psychological nuance, with the result that your impression of the scene is completely different.
When reading a painting, it is important to focus on the subject. But it's just as important to focus on the composition and be attentive to how the subject is put together. The similarities - the solitary walkers, single points of light, and diagonal pathways through uncertain terrain - indicates that the paintings might be presenting information in comparable ways. So we look closer.
Start with the figures, because it is human nature to focus on the figures in paintings that include them. We don't necessarily see ourselves in them, but they do give us something we can relate to as an access point.
Two things jump out:
1. The are going in opposite directions. Kondratenko's is moving inwards - away from us - and Beksinski's is heading out.
2. The relationship to the warm light source is different. Beksinski's carries his like a torch while Kondratenko's is moves towards his. One lights his own way and the other is drawn to the light.
These differences are significant, especially when taken together. One follows the light inward, towards something known. The other has to light his own path and is moving out towards the unknown. Which poses the next questions - where are they coming from and where are they going?
Kondratenko's destination is a church. Where he is coming from is unclear, but this is unimportant, given where he is going.
He follows a light that he doesn't have yet, but will soon reach. His journey is from the exterior world to the Logos, to the Christian community and salvation that is the only antidote to the chaos and evil of a fallen world. We can see his destination because it is a destination - the endpoint of wandering in the wilderness. Just as it was for Dante in his dark wood.
Beksinski's comes from the mysterious depths of the scene and his destination is unknown. The lurid light darkens ahead of him, suggesting that he is finding his way out of the hellscape he knew, but the future is uncertain. There is no light to guide him other than his own - his wisdom, discernment, resolve.
If there is a refuge of faith and Logos, he can't see it yet. It's a secular, material world, where fallen man is on his own.
Bringing us to the next question - where are they?
Kondratenko's world is cold and obscured, but natural. There is a bright moon and harsh beauty.
The perspective funnels our - and the wanderer's - attention to the warm light from the church, and the alignment with the moon tells us that this light is natural in its own way - the natural culmination of a journey through the metaphorical wilderness of the spirit.
The wander will soon be home.
There is nothing natural about Beksinski's. This is an artificial hell, a man-made one. The path isn't through nature, but between monstrous, anthropomorphic forms. The lighting is not a natural source like the moon, but a dirty glow. The way forward vanishes into darkness, rather than culminating in a house of Logos. And the only direction is the figure's own tiny light.
Taken together, the opposites are complementary inverses. The inversion point being the presence of Logos in the represented world. Beksinski's is the monstrous secular hell of materialist tyranny. Where there is no clear path of righteousness, just lurid depths where you're on your own. Survival demands some kind of escape but the light of your own powers promises nothing. Kondratenko reminds us that Logos restores the natural human condition, and that with it, we are never alone. We don't have to bear the overwhelmingly daunting task of navigating the valley of death that is the fallen world because the pathway through is assured.
Look at them together.
One is the promise of globalism - the tyrannical collective lie that crushes the spirit and stacks the bodies. There is no logos here - just a road into darkness that goes as far as your own spirit can take you and where you can't even see the sky. The other is the natural order of man in creation. A world where beauty prefigures spiritual wholeness. It's possible to imagine them as the same path - a journey out of the evils of vanity and inversion and into the light.
When we read these paintings, we see why the art of the West is purposeful. Although some 70 years apart, they describe mirror-image conditions that in the modern world must consider. And they don't just explain them like our narration - the show you them in a real visceral way. You can feel the oppressive gloom and the menace of one and the warm hope and promise of the other. You can see the difference between trying to light your own path through darkness and death and seeking your place in the Light. Between standing alone against the hopelessness of a fallen world and taking your rightful place as part of something bigger, no matter how what the world around you is like.
Caspar David Friedrich, Winter Landscape with Church, 1811, oil on canvas, Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Dortmund
This is the cultural heritage that the satanic globalists would steal from you.
We think otherwise.
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