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Ellie Taylor
ken Currie
Currie designs grotesque, large-scale paintings that have a morbid mood. A grand amount of Currie's artwork is of the rotten flesh. When looking through his work I have seen paintings where humans are slaughtering animals. This has influenced me to take my next adventure in the art of animal cruelty.
Currie makes his artwork with oil paintings on canvas. His painting that is called "The Flensers" is made from two colossal canvases and they are more than four meters wide. This painting shows workers slaughtering and skinning a whale for blubber, this painting then shows what is really happening in the world today where poachers are hunting tigers for their fur. In this painting they are using sharp pitchforks like tools to skin the carcass this symbolizes how the poachers kill animals with weapons but this also can suggest that the mammal is in pain and is going through torture because of the tools they are using on its body.
I found Curries painting in the Scottish national gallery of modern art. From this point onwards I wanted to work from and look more into his background of why he created all of his interesting images. This artist will also link to the part of my blog the museum visits as I was captivated when I saw the paintings.
The second piece of work that has inspired me is the two men carving out a stingrays stomach. The painting creates shudders up my spine because the slaughters have left the mammals to face upon its flesh this then creates a sense that the animal was still alive when slaughtered as the eyes are staring right at you. also to tell people of how much pain animals go through when they get slaughtered the pain and terror in their eyes.
Curries work is eerie this is because all of his backgrounds are black, dark and sinister. They make the animal and slaughters stand out, he keeps the painting not cramped and compacted so the viewer doesn't need to look everywhere in the image this is because the main idea is the animal getting slaughtered. This idea then links with another off Curries paintings "Krankenhaus" this painting was a nightmare of the world war one of the patients getting tested upon and slaughtered like animals it looks like he is trying to say that soldiers were getting slaughtered like animals. In a part of the painting you can see that one of the doctors are force-feeding the patient or victim through a tube this makes you wonder if they are actually using these patients for testing chemicals as you can then tell that the hospital is not making the patients better its make them ill and then die a painful death as you can see a doctor in the right-hand corner carry a victim of.
Ken Currie and John Bellany are inspired by the emotional impact of expressive and realistic depictions of animals. Also, Currie likes to see the world from an optimistic perspective.
John Bellany also links to Curries work as Bellany also uses a lot of dead animals in his work, for example, his painting of "lap dog" as this is a painting that explores death he adds in a sheep mask to represent self-sacralize in the Christian tradition.
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