My Work – lesley's headspace

Grief + Twinship

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2305404/Theres-grief-shattering-losing-twin-Here-raw-emotion-woman-reveals-identical-sisters-death-drove-suicide.html

In addition to this memoir, there are also support groups around the world for twinless twins. The Twinless Twins Support Group International, founded by Dr. Raymond Brant, came into play only in the late 1980s. Since then, the TTSGI has grown exponentially and provides an online community of support for those who have lost their twin.

I wonder what the ethics are, about a single child like myself dealing with themes of this nature. I feel like I should try to talk with people about this theme so I can fully understand it, even though it’s essentially inescapable because of the nature of the Castor/Pollux myth. October will be a thinking month. I’m forcibly restraining myself from doing anything for now and I’m going to keep thinking along the lines of all of the research I have encountered this semester to see what comes of it.

Le retour

Today I went through my work from Y3S2 (which is conceptually better than my current work – at the moment, my drawings and compositions are better than my old work, which is the way it should be progressing). I did this because I know those two projects (the Dioscuri Mystery Kit and [working title]) somehow have a voice and a flair to them, and I wanted to revisit them to try and find the spark that I seem to have lost.

This is what I gathered – I had an interesting type style that I did as a homage to House of Leaves, I had some rather good writing (capturing my voice as the artist and the voice of Pollux as a grieving brother) and my book format reflected the voice of the project with one side devoted to fact and the other side devoted to fiction. I don’t know how I even conceptualized the two projects, only that I did it in a way that brought it all together quite delightfully. I have a lot of source material there to work with and maybe that’s how I can ‘find my voice’, as the seniors mentioned.

I know this is probably going to be my third drastic change but the third time is the charm, as they say. I want to reframe my project around duality again, because having a theme and building a message into it is easier for me than starting from existing content and building the theme and message around the content. Again, this doesn’t mean that all my past work is wasted.

From the grotesque, I learnt that it’s really important to push it as far as you can if you want to do it. I can if I’m going to be exploring death/grief/loneliness. From mythology and tarot I learnt that I can compose meaningfully, and all the esoteric stuff will come in handy for the Pollux as apothecary/weird medical dispensary owner. From my old projects I realize that my final outcome should be a union of text and image, hopefully in a book (even my mother, who has always taken an interest in my work, just tells me I should save myself the agony and just do a book), because quite clearly I have a personal affinity for that.

For the rest of this month I’m going to work on finding a clear message/storyline and by November I should have a trajectory finalized. I think Vishaka was right when she said that you should just spend the entire semester conceptualizing. I lost myself and started too soon and too hastily. I’ve been under a lot of self-imposed stress lately and I don’t think I’ve been making my project as fun as it could be for me. So returning to these old projects (I guess the roundabout journey helped me to gather some new auxiliary ideas) will help a lot in reframing my project and building it into something better. I’ve never changed my idea so many times for any long-term project before. I’ve had a few. The problem is I like too many things and it’s so challenging to figure out what I want. To some serious conceptualizing in the next two weeks.

Will Bradley

(I just have to say, I know about all these illustrators I’ve been posting about recently because of Astrid’s GD History class. The assignment was really challenging but it was a really good class, thank you Astrid :> Just my public service announcement for the day~)

People are so rude sometimes. Will Bradley was often called the ‘American Beardsley’ but according to Wikipedia (please ignore this dubious-sounding source – I use Wikipedia to get the gist of things and move on to more reliable references when I do actual hardcore research) he was established as an illustrator before Beardsley’s prints became popular in England. Just a fun fact. I like both of them, though, and in my opinion their styles are quite obviously different even though they come from the same section of the visual language department (what am I writing, I’ll stop now).

*goes off into a corner to cry* Look at the amazing patterns and compositions. I haven’t even done a card back but I might use the Fates for that.

StrangeRemains.com is a gold mine of wonderful references

“Visitors were confronted with the skeletons of a child of four with a toy in its hands, a five-year-old holding a silk thread with an embalmed heart dangling from it, and a girl drying her eyes with a pocket handkerchief. Decorations, memento mori images and vanitas symbols put the horror of death in perspective by stressing the transience of life, by showing that the body was no more than an earthly frame for the soul. After death it no longer served its purpose – only an anatomist could still make it useful to the living.”

http://strangeremains.com/2015/06/14/turning-corpses-into-art-the-rembrandts-of-anatomical-preparation/

These are wonderful, wonderful images that embody the kind of feel I’m looking at. Something useful Astrid said in class the other day – my project could go for “an 1800s feel with a consciousness of contemporary work”.