🌙 Cast A Surreal Spell On Me ☁️
Fall down the rabbit hole of dreamy, gothic, bohemian queen Gertrude Abercrombie
“I paint the way I do because I’m just plain scared. I mean, I think it’s a scream that we’re alive at all - don’t you?” - Gertrude Abercrombie
Gertrude Abercrombie: "Two Ladders”, 1947
No this has NOTHING to do with clothing brand, Abercrombie & Fitch. Yes, my middle school wardrobe is SO disappointed.
This is all about Gertrude Abercrombie who I’m finding to be a super interesting and semi-mysterious artist in the early to mid 1900s. She was called the “Queen of Bohemian Artists” because of her cool, sceney parties she hosted in her extravagant Victorian home in Chicago. She surrounded herself with famous Jazz musicians and often threw listening parties. I picture her with a cocktail in hand, a cigarette in another while she danced around to live Jazz in her packed, smoke-filled living room. She often wore a pointed hat to emphasize her witchiness and drove a Rolls Royce. She’s such a vibe I can’t even handle it. She came from a family of opera singers so this must have shaped her interest in music and her ability to clearly bring the drama.
Abercrombie’s style of painting is labeled as Surrealist because her scenes usually don’t depict reality as we know it. There’s a lot of dreamy or nightmarish landscapes that just don’t make sense. To me her work feels like I’m looking into a still, mysterious dream that I prob don’t want to be in? She said, “I am not interested in complicated things nor in the commonplace, I like to paint simple things that are a little strange.” I liked this particular painting because it reminds me of a vivid dream I had when I was a kid and still somehow remember. Abercrombie paints these gothic, imagined scenes in such a precise, hard-edged way that for me it’s kind of a mind fuck.
She didn’t have formal training, didn’t always use the right tools/paints and didn’t focus on other artists at the time. (But s/o to Rene Magritte because she did say he influenced her.) Abercrombie painted what she needed and what she felt to be true from her inner consciousness.
I keep having weird dreams! Actually for pretty much all of 2020...so now I’m just going with it. ☁️