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Posts Tagged ‘sinister’

I used past events, present events, my mood–syncrhonicity–to create my art. I once again imitated Cornell’s dossier system, to clarify my imagination:

TENSION  4/23/2011

I found myself facing two paths in my present reality. I graduate in August, and I can cower back into the comfort of school and get my masters, or I can face the unknown and attempt to find a job. I felt a strange connection to Sir Gawain and his cowardice. I felt like a coward sometimes. I feel like a coward sometimes. I want to shrink from the metaphorical sharp iron hovering above my neck. It’s not easy to be stoic when facing one’s own mortality. 

The past events reached my contemplation when my mind wandered to how much nature was an influence in my bloxes. There is always a trace of it. It’s usually always in the background, actually. I thought about the previous half of this project, and how most of my emblems connected with nature, also. 

I thought about multiplicity as a web; I imagined Sir Gawain caught in that web. There is so much tension. The ending discomforted me. Sir Gawain is left shamed and humiliated, humbled forever. Like emasculation. But, Arthur and his fellow knights laugh around him, agreeing to all wear green belts around their neck to commemorate him. Seemed like they were mocking him. Is that a happy ending? I felt uneasy when I read it. 

I feel chaotic in my writing right now. Like I keep shifting from past to present. Happy to sad.

There is a vivid image of blood boiling that I see when I read this one line: “The blood burns in his cheeks.” Like shame exploding from his face. 

I feel the further along I go with these bloxes, the more sinister my tutor text seems. It never seemed that way to me before, not even as child. I think it’s me. I think I’m feeling dark. Maybe it’s because of those two paths. Uncertainty is malevolent. 

I continue to be surprised by how open I become in this dossiers. It’s more than a diary. It’s an exploration of the imagination. I feel as though when I read the dossiers back to myself, I am psychoanalyzing myself.

I now understand the Grand Meaulnes Feeling that Cornell wanted to embody. It’s not necessarily a physical wandering, but a mental one, making connections and leaving breadcrumbs to find  the way back.

That sinister feeling is so vivid in my Multiplicity blox. The background, as usual, is a nature scene of two different paths separated by a twisted tree, burned and colored green, and given a layered effect. I covered this image, and every image thereafter, with a plastic wrap filter. It reminded me of suffocation, of that tense feeling I sometimes get in my chest that makes it hard to breathe. A discomfort. The background is dark. There are layers, but they are hard to see.

All the images on top are barely visible placed to the right, within the darkness. They pile up on top of each other, creating a multi-faceted wall. There is a painting I found only that was called “Covetous” with several abstract boxes that had multiple layers. Covetousness was one of the actions that shamed Sir Gawain. 

Then I skewed the color balance on the drama masks, whose mouths are open so wide it is surreal, giving them a creepy aura. They are lightened and blended, the brightest thing in the box.

Below that, there is a grotesque image I found (I am sure it is created, and not real) of two people drowning in boiling blood. I was disgusted and allured to the image. It was so sinister. It was perfect. I inversed the color and blended the image, so that it was so not so blaringly disgusting; I wanted  its malevolence to be more subtle.

I thought about tension. How the word was repeated in my dossier and how it was the perfect word for the ending to the book. I went back to Graphic Design: The New Basics by Lupton and Phillips, remembering the textual art created from that word. It had to be in there. It seems to fade into the distorted chaos that frames the background, but it also is the most prominent element in the blox.

Overlaying it all is a moist spider web that has drops of water clinging to its strings. I used a soft light filter on the image so that it would be merely an after thought in the blox, something that truly completed the sinister mood and reinforced the idea of multiple simultaneously.


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