Still Lifes III
Forging Van Goghs is an
extremely profitable business. This is my attempt at an early
draft of "Starry Night." A version in which he forgot
the stars. Can't you just see him crumpling up twenty versions of
the landscape, cursing because he couldn't figure out what was
missing, and then one day he looks up and realizes Hey! I
forgot the stars! That's what gives the stars in that
painting their power—his surprise at suddenly seeing them.
Van Gogh spent far too little of his life starry-eyed. Think of
all those hideous orange and green paintings of his bedroom—and
don't forget the orange and green self-portraits either. Ugh! He
sure wasn't starry-eyed when he painted those. But "Starry
Night" is a happy painting—aside, of course, from the
shaky sense that the stars will go out at any moment. When Van
Gogh saw stars he really saw them.
If I were to put a star in this picture it would have to be
only one, very large and yellow and spiraling in the upper left
corner. But I don't think I'm ready to draw a star that could do
justice to Van Gogh's.
Even the most cursory glance through my
artwork will make it obvious that I'm addicted to saturation.
Almost every time I work with photographs, my very first action
is to drastically increase the saturation—and this picture
was no exception. In fact, it was still blindingly fluorescent
when I first thought I'd finished it. However, a second glance
convinced me to cut the saturation in half, resulting in the
picture you see in front of you here. Anybody less addicted to
saturation would probably cut the saturation by another 90% or so,
but I couldn't bring myself to do that. I love bright colors! If
you ever pass me on the street you're guaranteed to notice me—you'll
have to shield your eyes from the brightness of my clothes. So
say hi.
This, of course, is a horse.
Isn't it pretty? It was pretty before I got to it too, but it's
even prettier now.
This
picture was inspired by David Bowie's 1995 album 1. Outside.
The album tells the story of a woman named Ramona A. Stone, who
murdered a pregnant woman, raised the baby girl ("Baby Grace")
for fourteen years, and then murdered the girl to turn her
innards into a sculpture. For some reason I was driven to get
into Ramona's mind, so I envisioned her doing expressionist
paintings. This is what I thought she would paint. It's her
sculpture of the Baby Grace's intestines, shown against blue sky—not
a finished sculpture but simply what she saw in her mind as she
was planning the sculpture. The pieces floating around as she
decided where to put them. To Ramona it's a happy picture,
because she sees the sculpture as the culminating masterpiece of
her art career; but to anyone who finds murder disturbing, Ramona's
happiness only makes it all the more disturbing.
I find the picture interesting precisely because it's so uninteresting
when severed from the story behind it. I wouldn't like it at all
if it didn't have a story behind it, yet with the story I find it
very powerful. And if I simply told a story about Ramona painting
a happy-looking picture of her victim's intestines, I don't think
that would work very well either without the picture to accompany
it. The words and the picture are each meaningless by themselves,
yet when I put them together I find that they become very
emotional for me.
I created the picture using the 3D Pipes screensaver that
comes with Windows '98, drawing several different pinkish and
yellow textures for the intestines and pasting the different
pipes on top of each other until I got a pattern I liked. Then I
pasted that onto a drawing I'd done (using vector-based art tools
for a realistic effect) of clouds and blue sky.
© 1999, 2000 by QueerByChoice. All rights reserved.