Prompt #4: Destroy-- Own Monsterland

For this assignment, I took Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, renowned for its elegance and poise, and destroyed the subject into pieces. The keen eyes have been disfigured, not to mention the brute expression of the lips, devoid of any sign of mysterious smile in the original piece. The chest, hands, as well as the landscape have been dismantled into a cacophony, resulting in nothing but a continuous swirls and lines. The beautiful, attractive Mona Lisa has turned into a chaotic monster.

#4 Il cielo in una barca

http://youtu.be/SwowUENWfhw

Fragmentation - or what I saw.

On our gallery walk, I wasn't really attracted by this painting:

 

But when I looked closer, I saw this:

Suddenly I was really attracted. I started remembering my days as a carpenter, standing at the big saw the whole day, cutting wood for many students, bit by bit. I dreamed about the saws and the noise, the odor of resin, my dusty hair. After a while I woke up again and left.

After two weeks now, with more distance, I have a warm feeling looking at this painting. The mood I was in when I safed the stage of mind decided now, what my relation to this painting is. I can only speculate, but I guess it wasn't the intention of the painter. At this point, a painting starts to live.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxPZh4AnWyk

The Golem of Gotham

Monster Portraiture (Prompt 4)

   Infant, adolescent and adult portraits of Adolf Hitler that I tore apart and then used to create a collage. I was playing around with his facial expressions until I came up with the image pictured. What you see is his left eye as a three year old, his nose, mouth and chin as a teenager and the rest of his face and upper bust as an adult. Here, nuanced gestures are employed by controlling a tilt of the head, a slight shift of the eye or a drop of the chin. In this small way, the process of working with the images brought the subject to life for me. Interestingly, the innocence and vulnerability typical of childhood images are lost on the collective monstrous end result. 

I tore up the bible to make my own new testament. Playing with the idea of what happens when texts are fragmented and how meaning is changed, I decided to take one of the most holy texts (to some) and twist its words. I did not change the content: merely switched it around. Context is just as important as content. Order matters. I guess changing this could make me to some a monster. Blasphemous. Ironically when read as what it is: I am in fact spreading a message as some of the most conservative. Guess this is a monster in the eyes of the beholder. 

Fruity Pebble Painting (prompt 3)

Honestly--I'll just get this out of the way--this picture reminded me of Fruity Pebbles at first glance.  For our European friends, Fruity Pebbles is a brand of very sugary cereal marketed towards children, a brand that I remember fondly. 

Anyhoo, the picture is happy, bright, has a lot of energy--through the colors used and the quality of the lines and also through the interesting shapes formed by the contrasting colors.  The center of the painting has an interesting, more fragmented and scattered design that utilizes black, white and shades of grey.  It has a more airy and cosmic feel to it, more ethereal. There's something dark and mysterious, pensive almost, about the central design that contrasts very interestingly with the more chipper and childish arrangement of colors that surrounds it.

Overall, the entire picture gives me the impression of two different worlds of color and energy.  The first world is bright and varied, ordered and patterned, more earthy, floral, and lighthearted.  It has an edgier, peppier, and more hyper energy to it in comparison with the second world of the darker design in the center of the composition.

 The other world of the central, darker design, has some sort of expressionistic, random, but also ordered, cosmic/intergalactic chaos in it.  It's not so edgy or faceted. There are few discernible shapes in it. Some of the lines are curved and swirly, almost like a galaxy, while through this central design there are scattered white and black specs and splotches, almost like stars.


I could go on about what sort of meaning I find in this painting, but for the sake of keeping this post relatively short, I won't go into that.


The second picture, the fragment/close-up, has a very different feel and geometry to it. It almost seems as if there is an intentional border that surrounds and parallels the black and white semi square-shaped design in the very center of the fragment. The second picture seems to be more fragmented itself; while the actual entire paining seems to be made up of its own visible fragments of color and line, it seems to have more cohesion and consistency in both the first and second worlds. This isolated segment of the painting feels more disjointed, divided, and chaotic, a more emotional and expressionistic mix of lines and color.  The fragment picture doesn't create a clear contrast between two aesthetic worlds, so for me it evokes a more purely emotional response than does the entire, original picture (in which I see some sort of intentional and conceptual distinction being made between various sections of the painting).


So I started off thinking about children's cereal and ended up thinking about life, the planet, the universe, etc., as well as feeling a complex mixture of emotions while looking at the fragment and thinking about what the creator of such an image may have been feeling and thinking on a conscious and subconscious level. I managed to see real meaning and intention in a peace that others would likely interpret very differently, possibly because I found an isolated bit of the painting and compared it to the whole work; I find that very cool.

 So, seeing how chaotic and mixed-up the fragment picture is gave me some perspective on the more intellectual and deliberate aspects of the original work.