Description
‘Nightshade’ by Petra Frankova
Artist: Petra Frankova
Title: ‘Nightshade’
Medium: Graphite pencil and chalk on 250gsm Stonehenge cotton paper
Dimensions: 9″ x 6.5″
Framing: Unframed
Year of Creation: 2022
About the Artwork:
(Encyclopaedia Bufonica, Johannes Georg Riessler 2022)
“As revealed in the previous chapters, the umbrous connections among the amphibians (especially of frog origin) and poisonous plants of various repulsive intensities is commensurate with the frightfulness of the environment in which the repulsive union between them occurs.
Paris, the city of outcasts, whores, wickedness, satanists, bloodsuckers and the worst of all – artists – is an example most foul and clear. Only here can one find thickets and smelly gardens full of herbs scenting the deadly vapours, beckoning to meet all the often innocent amphibious tadpoles. Those herbs deform, tear and distort amphibian’s growth into a noble swamp creature, killing the divine spark within it and creating instead a grinning parody of animal nobility.
These chimeras of plant and animal do not grow, but bloom into an otherworldly putridity – and how they bloom! They blossom in vicious rippling waves, slowly circling around the minds of passing beggars, whom they kill outright;
but if they reach the mind of an aesthete or an intellectual, they turn him into a witness or, God forbid, the harbinger of all the horrors cursed from our graceful world.
Therefore, beware of frog monsters on henbanes, beware of fire-bellied toads on poppies and tree frogs on belladonnas, do not want to look at the toad-headed devil’s snare! Your soul, if it be happy, will die; and if not, it will be damned, drunk from the vapours most putrid for all eternities.”
About the Artist:
(Artist Bio)
Petra is a traditional printmaker and illustrator from Czech Republic.
Her universe is one of almost tyrannical, symbolist harmony. The meticulous attention to detail combined with the unnamed feeling behind words, senses and meaning. Quiet, unmoving, perpetual gazing upon something charmingly familiar, yet strangely and deeply foreign. Alien, ambiguous, disconnected from our expectations and challenging ordinary perception – creatures humming silently, in their shattered words of dread and eeriness.