Reverie

Reverie - glue, paper and image, edited and computer generated.

I have been dying to participate in Inspire Me Thursday again for months, but simply haven't gotten around to it. Life is hectic, as usual. But this week - today in fact - I finally found use for the image of Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière that was posted as the week's prompt.

I was stumped looking at this old oil painting, thinking I'd have never been able to interpret or appropriate the image as my own creation. I'm not much of a collage artist, so that was out the window. And I just couldn't be bothered drawing it and stuffing that up.

Then, quite by accident really, this afternoon I stumbled across a list of surrealist techniques on Wikipedia. Whilst looking at some of the awesome things surrealists do, I discovered the idea of "Cubomania". Basically, a photograph or any other image is cut up into small squares. It is then arranged in a manner that aims not to reconstruct the image but rather dissect it, thus scattering complex visual language that may have otherwise been unseen. The eye catches bits and pieces of the composition it would otherwise have overlooked.

So that's exactly what I did. I downloaded the image of Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière from the link on flickr provided within the IMT prompt, then cropped the image and drew up its squares. After having crafted all the lines, the squares where cut, as was a piece of paper to size of the cropped image. I arranged the squares in quite a randomised fashion, then scanned it onto my computer.

From there, I edited the image. I changed the colour to a monochromatic scale. Then, reproduced the image in a flipped fashion - the original image resting beside it - in order to create more interest.

And there you have it, a day dream, a strange reverie created by me and inspired by Madame Rivière.