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.

Good Old Visual Arts :)

"The Duchess", mixed media on cardboard

Ah, the first Visual Arts topic/project of the term. Basically we were instructed to collect items over a weekend, just like Andy Warhol, and thus create a mixed media work out of our garbage. I collected all sorts of goodies I found around our house and swapped little pieces from my own pile of crap with friends.

I didn't want to make the sort of pretty things most of the other students in the class were bound to create. Pretty isn't for me. I have a male teacher this year, and being the sort of "artiste" I am, it's a little troubling describing the meaning of my works to him. This is about the sex trade, how violated women go on to sell themselves just so they can survive day to day. The title, The Duchess, comes from finding a ticket to the film of the same name starring Kiera Knightley and Ralph Fiennes which was released in 2008.

I got 10/10, and the same score for a graphite drawing of it which I may post later.

A run through of the crap on this piece of cardboard:
Acrylic paint, a random doll I found at an op-shop (thrift store) I found about a month ago, a piece of foam from a box of soft pastels, an old tape I used to interview a veterinarian for an assignment last year, a holiday photograph, a poem from an old Moon Diary, a paper heart I peeled off the box of a Christmas present, a Joker card, an empty packet of pills, the wrapper for dissolvable paracetamol tablets, Band-Aid packaging, movie ticket, an magazine advertisement for the TV show True Blood, cut-out pictures of meat from Woolworths weekly special brochures, a brochure about customer privacy from FoneZone, and an old makeup sponge. And glue.

Sorry for the crappy photo as per usual. I think I need a better camera. I'm also studying 'Photography, Video and Digital Imaging' in addition to Visual Arts and so I think that'd be quite beneficial. Might post some of my new photos up too :)