The Parts

"Once upon a time deep beneath the crystal sea, a girl with eyes like broken glass lay bound in kelp and sharp little fish bones, dragged through the silt by the currents of the ocean..."

Not JUST drawing dolls, but distorted bodies with a view to illustrating the kelp-girl.

Things I was considering in terms of body type & distortion thereof- Naoko Takeuchi's sailor moon manga style- long, slender, effeminate shapes: 

  Comparatively, a chibi of sailor chibi moon to display the other extreme of 'kawaii' japanese distortions:

 Betty Boop, much like a chibi distortion:

Jhonen Vasquez's art style displays similar:

Tim Burton's pen and ink Edward Gorey/German Expressionism derivative:

Considering blacked out eyes or the blank alternative. I think blacked out looks terrible, so I'm glad I established this early on:

Drawings of doll anatomy, separate pieces, smashed up bodies:

Thinking about the distortion of the body in liquid, fractured by the crystalline sea:

Thinking about the glass-plate sea and the girl bound in kelp. Different bindings. Different materials. Etc:

Ink and water marks of Hair, Twine and Bandages:

Using watered down cellulose to mono-print an image of my broken&bound doll, Rauschenberg style?

Misty, wet, but still with the suggestion of the figure bound. I may use one of these as a background for my girl piece. I 

Rauschenberg: 

Looking at Rauschenberg's technique (I think this is from my second post):

Misty background type things:

Use of colour, use of distortion, water/acid moving and Picasso's drawing everything - both front and back - simple cubism, pieces trapped in a prism of something or other:

Drawing and layering the parts to form an image:

Thinking about 'Picasso Style', cubist front and back - the 360 degree art of Stephen Wiltshire:

Applying it to the doll's head, and the idea of the broken layers of self in the sea:

This part joins onto the one beneath it, but I didn't know how to take a big panaramic photo:

I forgot to photograph the last part...

Thing is, drawing a very small, shapely & rounded as a panorama is very tricky - it looks completely different only a few mm across, which is my excuse for the lack of continuity between the parts and, also, at the behest of my teacher I was trying to draw much larger than I normally do but I kept altering back to the actual size of the doll head and the perspective got MORE screwed. But I liked doing this very much anyhow.

Control, Constriction.

I was thinking about what 'autonomy' meant and control, stages, framing, perspective, portrayal and symbolism. How an artists approaches and exhibits and manipulates work - from the tiny brush strokes to the placement of complete pieces together in galleries and the like.
Thinking about Hans Bellmer's complete control of his DIY dolly. There are so many ways to approach this piece. So many ways to arrange it. I guess it's like most things though. AGAIN, like arranging all the shards of mosaics and collage and tones and shades of personalities that give the veneer of the established and autonomous self.

I guess a reason I like this so much is it seems to be a parody, ultimately, of the idea of the autonomous self and of existentialist philosophy. Some people are genetically prone to X Y or Z. Some people are pushed to X Y or Z by circumstance. I'm not a fatalist, genes and circumstance aren't the be all and end all - there is some element of choice in things, I think. I don't know. I can't possibly say what it is or isn't. If I could all biology, psychology, philosophy and everything would be solved.
What? I'm doing it again.
MALLEABILITY AND CONTROL.Subjection of the subjective....Where was I?

'The Parts' workbook:
 
I was thinking about the implications of things - like Michel Nedjar's dolls being made of trash and dirt, a juxtaposition of beloved and worthless to be a model for the holocaust victims.
For now, I think I'll just transcribe something I wrote up in my workbook to explain to the class where I'm headed. So I can know, myself, what my plan is.
"The implications of things; how a visual narrative can be suggestive- how a poem is a series of words but those words have emotional connotations and significance. In an age of seeming secularism, archetypes and household gods still exist - pervade consumerist, communist, primitive, progressive and conservative societies and cultures. And how these archetypes, symbols, role models are condensed, simplified visions of people or even abstract concepts that once, as all things, once had a wider scope but are now mascots of something or other. Posable and boxed up like dolls."

Like in 'Creating Water' where I was looking at... creating watery effects in a manner of ways. Though, I must concede, I didn't have much reference going on there. Oh well, make things, think, evaluate, think, make more, continue 'til death.
This post is a good place to start next week. Draw more dolls, draw more bodies.Think - constriction. Dollies.
And this museum page!
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