BASEMENT MONSTER is a piece that depicts the fear of the unknown. As a child, I often spent my days alone, hiding in the basement from my older brothers and sisters and their friends. The cellar of our house in New York city was my sanctuary, my safe place. Yet it also was the source of my greatest fears. There is something deep within our DNA as humans that makes us seek out dark, confined places when feel vulnerable. Places to hide. Like our cave dwelling ancestors, we seek out tenebrous protective places that we can shelter in, fortify and use to repel enemies. Yet at the same time, dark places that are closed in can also be traps when an enemy wants to ambush us. Perhaps the monster is even waiting for us deep inside the cave, or beneath us. Such childhood fantasies and fears are legitimate and based in hundreds of thousands of years of human and Neanderthal experience. And with a febrile imagination, I still am terrified of basements and dim underground tunnels and storage areas. So here is how I attempted to capture these feelings of inchoate dread and nightmares of the bogeyman in an artwork called BASEMENT MONSTER: Layered fields of rust, umber and charcoal fold into a central, mask-like form with white hatch marks that read like an eye, a brow, and a set of teeth. I wanted the granular textures and gold flecks to catch the light so they feel like embers on a weathered surface. Triangular voids of deep black set a diagonal rhythm against smeared bands of crimson and ochre, and seams of pale white and lavender suggest erosion and repair. What do you notice first? Keywords: Burnt, Umber, Depth, Fear, Rust, Glitter, Texture, Earth, underground, nightmare, dust, grey, waiting, imaginary, imagination, ether, smoke Monster, Bogeyman, Spectre, Phantom, Killer, Child, Childhood, foe, lethal, poison, basement, cellar, doom, struggle, displacement, anger, rage, terror, red, blood, blackness, tar, black, brown, seething, churning, striking, waiting, preying, stalking, sharp, stones, rocks, edifice, careful, illusiin #basementmonster #dasgallerie #texture #earthtones #abstractart

Artwork Size & Ink Base:

35 x 45

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Daniel Aaron Schwartz

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