now loading: final year project
I found this on Google images this morning and this is easily hands down THE BEST gorgon design I’ve seen in a long time. It’s really lazy and typical to draw a gorgon as a conventionally beautiful woman with snakes for hair and I don’t want to do that. This is great – threatening yet with a vestige of femininity that’s apparent enough to creep you out. This gorgon is phenomenal.
So what is this Janus deck? A crafted fortune deck meant to use recognizable tropes from Greek mythology for the seemingly directionless or fearful individual (me sometimes) to divine sensible responses from the gods. Janus is symbolic of beginnings, and personally significant to me because of how I kind of needed a new beginning for my project as well. (I will draw more bizarre-looking cards, I promise. I know these two are terribly tame, but they’re very early experiments.)
Here is my to-do list.
The way I’ve been working is sort of an adhoc make first, conceptualize later thing so I can fulfill my almost neurotic compulsion to feel productive. Making also helps me calm my thyroids (or wherever my FYP anxiety is stored). I’ve been chasing after this lofty idea of The Perfect Most Beautiful FYP Concept Ever and that probably curtailed my desire to do anything, since it didn’t live up to whatever vague castle in the air I had in my head. The more I make the more material I have to choose from, which is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing anyway. More cards tomorrow, more book-related thoughts, and hopefully back to some kind of professional standard of blogging that doesn’t sound so much like a stream of consciousness.
Harry Clarke did these majestic illustrations for Poe’s tales. I’ve seen them before but I forgot to post them up until recently. His work looks a lot like Beardsley’s and there’s no doubt that there was influence there! Find the rest here: http://50watts.com/Harry-Clarke-Illustrations-for-E-A-Poe
Astrid left a comment for me linking to Aleister Crowley’s Thoth deck as well as a 45-minute documentary on Crowley himself. I’m about to give that a watch, and I really love the insane symbolism going on in the Thoth deck (even though I don’t really understand most of it as yet). My favourite is still the Rider Waite and the dry wit of the Fantod Pack has so much lovely personality, but this complements my research quite well and might lead me to some new ideas about how to go about working out the mechanics of my own deck.
My ennui seems to be an ongoing thematic concern (I mean, I get flashes of terrible anxiety about FYP even in the minutes after waking up – this morning I was lying in bed and suddenly felt overcome with the urge to breathe into a bag and run around and scream in panic) so maybe this deck will clarify things for me. Making always calms me down.
Here’s my idea so far:
The Janus Deck
Janus is the Roman god of beginnings and doors. Everything begins with a beginning, and mythology finds its way into everything. Janus is said to be the god you invoke in order to invoke other deities, and it makes sense to me to anchor this deck with his image. The deck could work as a gateway to ideas, resolutions and narratives, and will use imagery from Greek mythology (it seems oddly disjunctive to anchor this subject with a Roman deity), which lets me draw grotesque monsters and allow me to put my own spin on existing rich content.
I made this in one day, so that should reassure me of the speed of my work and remind me that I don’t have to panic and that I can do anything. It’s about the size of an A6 sheet, working smaller because it’s just a draft. I’m thinking of incorporating dioramas into my bookmaking process, along with fortune telling and the grotesque as a medium to convey monsters like Scylla and Medusa. I have yet to flesh this out properly but it feels like all the pieces are slowly, slowly coming together, even if I can’t tell how that will happen.
I was looking at different kinds of fortune telling decks after reading Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies (in which characters tell their stories to each other using only tarot cards, and the audience hypothesizes what happened based on the meanings/imageries of each card and where it’s placed relative to other cards). I’m looking at Greek mythology again and thinking of making my own version of a fortune deck, inspired by the Fantod Pack. I’m not sure whether to turn it into a game as yet but I’m collecting card images and ideas that I like just in case it leads me somewhere. I’m still trying to find a concrete message to convey in my work.
I don’t quite understand the Lenormand deck the way I understand the traditional tarot (I have the Rider Waite deck at home). I love well-crafted card decks and anchoring my card images in mythology would save me from having to build a whole new universe of images. Greek mythology is full of grotesques (for example, all the women who were metamorphosed into monsters) so none of my previous work is wasted, exactly.
B suggested that my card deck could lead people into the grotesque, and in doing so reflect their own self-denial in a way that can be understood (drawing influence from my readings on Bakhtin and Kayser). I’m wondering if there’s a way to extrapolate meaning from Greek mythology in a way unique to me. I remember reading that Greek mythology makes up so much ground of the human psyche in Western thought – if you look at Freudian psychology, some of his theories are named after Greek myths (i.e. the Oedipus complex). I guess this is a better starting point.
Since he supplied us with a visual vocabulary for cutesy dread over many decades, perhaps it comes as no surprise that Edward Gorey designed a set of whimsical tarot cards. The set is called the “Fantod Pack,” the word fantod signifying “a state of worry or nervous anxiety, irritability” and thus possibly the most Edward Gorey word ever. (David Foster Wallace was fond of the word as well, using the phrase “howling fantods” multiple times in Infinite Jest; the main clearinghouse website for DFW information is called The Howling Fantods.)
Not surprisingly, Gorey’s tarot set is (a) not precisely a tarot set, (b) reflexively downbeat, (c) more like a parody of a tarot set, and (d) utterly hilarious. Seriously, and I know that he is known for this style of humor, but looking over the Fantod Pack will give you a whole new appreciation for the possibilities of the deadpan mode of humor.
http://dangerousminds.net/comments/edward_goreys_tarot_card_set
I found this idea (unsurprisingly) on Pinterest and it’s slowly helping me reignite my desire to do something cool for FYP. I love how Gorey adapts the tarot tradition in his own humorously grim style and it encourages me to want to adapt my own card pack in a similar fashion (but in a way that suits my theme). I love esoteric kits and strange objects and I was looking at that again as a way of anchoring my theme in a concrete place. I’m going to make several small projects inspired by the ideas I’ve gathered on Pinterest and use some text by Italo Calvino as inspiration. Hopefully by immersing myself in making, I’ll overcome the ennui I’ve been feeling and get on track to progress!
Baroque is a strange RPG video game that I was quite taken with when I was 16 (just in terms of art – I’m not that much of a gamer), so you can see how my interest in the strange and creepy world of surreal bizarre hybrids goes way back. I really don’t know where I’m going at the moment but I usually find that looking back on old influences tends to help me a lot.
One of my old ambitious ideas was to make my own tarot deck, which would be a great vehicle for drawing. The tarot led me back to Baroque, where the game universe is populated by Meta Beings that all correspond to the cards in the major arcana of the tarot.
I love great character design and these all strike me as being uniquely expressive of each major arcana card that they’re meant to correspond to. If I want to reinterpret tarot cards, there has to be a purpose to them. Right now, I am lacking a purpose to what I’m doing. I’m going to write down everything we’ve discussed today and have another flip through the Codex Seraphinianus (really tempted to buy my own copy!).
Inspired by the fear of deep water. I was thinking of creating a book containing creatures that personify very strange niche feelings, but I want a better way of unifying them. I will post later when I figure out how to frame the project.
I borrowed Awful/Resilient: The Art of Alex Pardee from the ADM library last week and went through it on the train with the uncles and aunties beside me looking quite confused by the fact that I found these illustrations so enchanting.
This is Pardee’s Digested Children series, which is really amazing in terms of how the body form is distorted and how even despite the monstrous subject matter my mum still maintained that these were kind of cute (due to the vibrant colours). I love the creativity of his nightmare creatures and how the scale is represented through the children trapped within their bodies.
I’m thinking of experimenting with this kind of colouring style as well, and drawing larger format images so that I can incorporate more details into the forms of the creatures I create.
I love the contrast between the ‘cute’ elements and the grotesque elements in his work. I think this exemplifies the aesthetic of ero guro nansensu in some ways – there’s a clash of elements and perhaps even a clash in terms of the viewer response to the work.