So, today I want to share with all you lovely folk one of my most treasured favorite pastimes — staring at fantastical art and architecture. Oh, and by the way, by “fantastical”, I don’t mean “really freakin’ awesome” (which, to be fair, most of these paintings are), but rather “magical” or “fantasy-inspired”. Like this:
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Pretty cool, huh? Just the sheer amount of attention to detail is fun enough to admire. But I think the best aspect of these images is how easily they serve as jumping pads for the imagination. You’ve just been presented with a small snapshot of a beautiful and fantastical world, now it’s up to you to flesh this world out. Two more breathtaking images to prove my point.
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I’ve heard before that the most fundamental purpose of all art is to provoke some sort of emotion. Luckily, it looks like some of the best fantastical landscapes can accomplish just that. No longer is the artist restrained by the limits of reality. Here’s a piece that, through masterful use of color and space, radiates a lonely and wistful kind of feeling.
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And here’s one that’s just really ominous. (Here’s the artist.)
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(Incidentally, it seems like a lot of these artists have jobs working for video game companies. Is the art in games all this great because if so, I may have to get into gaming.)
But hey, some of these pieces are also just crazy imaginative. Have two of my favorites.
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So, it looks like the large majority of the images that I’m posting seem to be either folksy, whimsical fairytale landscapes or more traditionally medieval-influenced ones (also there was the cool steampunk one at the beginning, but that one kind of sits in a class of it’s own). But some of the most profound pieces seem to be inspired by more exotic locales.
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Oh and by the way, remember how I was talking about the sheer attention to detail some of these works show? Yeah, I really wasn’t kidding about that. Some of this stuff looks like it could be from a photograph.
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So, um. I guess we’ll conclude with a penguin because penguins are pretty cool.
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On a final note, if this is something that is at all interesting to you, then I quite highly recommend that you watch Makoto Shinkai’s The Place Promised in Our Early Days right now (along with every other film the man has created). Because seriously, the movie is basically a good hour and a half of breathtaking imagery that just teeters on the edge of the fantastical before crossing it completely.