Urban Legends in Artwork

The Hands Resist Him painting

Urban Legends in Artwork

This week for my blog investigation I was looking at ways I could add subtle details of paranormal or things of legends into my artwork when I began to go down a rabbit hole of famous art pieces with strange histories or events attached to them. I think my investigation of this subject has led me to thinking about the ramifications a simple painting or piece may have upon someone who just views it briefly or owns the piece since in a lot of these cases the collectors ended up experiencing side effect that may or may not be related to the artwork itself. There are many famous artworks that have strange or creepy stories tied to them so I thought it'd be interesting to take a look at what some of these stories are.

The first painting I will look at is the piece The Hands Resist Him by Bill Stoneham. Bill says the painting is supposed to represent the divide between the tangible and fantastical worlds shown by the real life boy and the ghost like hands behind him on the other side of the glass. The thing that makes this painting different than any other is that many believe it to be haunted or have some sort of paranormal background. After realizing that the owner of the gallery where this painting was housed and the critic who first reviewed it both died with in a year of coming into contact with the painting, it started becoming more well known and was eventually sold on Ebay for $1025.00 in the year 2000. Others were said to have seen the characters in the painting move, leave the painting or even appear in the room where the painting was being held. Since this has happened Bill Stoneham has since created 2 sequels in this painting series.

The other Painting I will be looking at is called The Crying Boy created by the Italian painter Giovanni Bragolin. This painting like The hands resist him has a strange phenomenon attached to it. This painting was out of a series that Bragolin completed in the 1950's but the crying boy was by far the most famous and sold upward of 50,000 copies worldwide. People began becoming suspicious when numerous instances of buildings began burning down that had this painting in them. That by itself wouldn't be so strange considering its popularity but the common thing about these fires was that in every case the painting would be removed from the rubble unharmed. Once people began becoming superstitious, on the Halloween of 1985 The Sun which is a British newspaper had people send in their copies of the painting to be burned once and for all to stop the spread of the issue.

There are of course other things similar to these 2 paintings that people are superstitious about such as Probably the most famous the Mona Lisa which is not necessarily seen as paranormal but is believed to have some sort of code or secret linked to it. Another thing is the Hope diamond which I didn't feel was appropriate to include since it is simply a gemstone and not really a piece of artwork but it is still something I find interesting and worthwhile checking out if you're into that sort of creepy thing like I am.

Work Log:
Monday: Choir Field Trip
Tuesday: Modelling Claw foot feet on bathtub
Wednesday: create drain and exposed sink pipe hardware
Thursday: continue working on those models
Friday: create a metal texture and begin layout of the bathroom