Contextualization: Historic influence

Exploring the nature of birth, death, and the fragility of human life, in project 3 I examine the temporality of health and the manifestation of the individual. I referenced Auguste Rodin’s, The Three Shades, a bronze sculpture from the 1800’s that demonstrates a three part representation of a bowed single person in three different stages of suffering, death and sin. Originally, this 19.7×13.1×3.3 foot statue was commissioned to be a mount on top of the Gates of Hell, a door Rodin created depicting Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, specifically the scene of The Inferno; since then, there have been many plaster casts and molds of the sculpture held in various museums, some specifically being the Musée Rodin in Paris and Kunsthaus Zürich in Switzerland. Created in a similar context, I used the similar notion of a single person in different stages of suffering within my own self-portrait, creating an unknown plane of existence where the viewer questions both what is real and the state of the figures themselves.

Auguste Rodin: Three Shades

Gates of Hell

Smile of the Three Graces- 2nd Cent. Roman copy of Greek Sculpture

 Antonio Canova: Three Graces (Three Fates) 

Garden of Love II- Wassily Kandinsky

I also pulled reference from the Robert Longo’s Men in the Cities series. Photographing his peers in assorted movements in modern workday clothes, Longo in turn created large scale charcoal drawings based off these photographs; Longo constructs a narrative within the portraits of isolation parallel to urban alienation. These expressive movements loaded with shady meaning in relation to my own painting construct a similar dialogue of isolation even when surrounded by two other figures. I choose to illustrate sweatshirts as opposed to work clothes to connect more on an everyday level to the audience. Although any person might not understand on a personal level, the notion of being trapped within your own body, health reasons or otherwise; struggling to take off/zip your sweatshirt is an ironic reality every person withstands at least once in their life eluding to the juxtaposition of fate. Similarly presented to the three fates, of whom measured the thread of mortality in Greek and Roman mythology, this similar notion of life is put into question through the chaotic form of the figures.

Robert Longo: Men in the Cities

I used cool grey cel-vinyl for the under painting and soft sweatshirts, and finished by layering different degrees of potency of lamb black oil paint for detail of the forms. By using these two colors, I was able to create a very smooth and seamless illustration of my body and hair in contrast to stark white within the sweatshirt and flat dove grey of the background. The relationship of covered to uncovered demands the attention of the struggle between the unrecognized mental and physical states of an individual.

Vija Celmins: 

Fernando Vicente:

I read Fragments for a History of the Human Body Part 2, by Michel Feher, a French philosopher and cultural interpretist who unravels the relation of the body to the divine and at one point examines the Platonism idea that a soul of celestial origin is imprisoned or even entombed in the body. Moreover that concept that a soul dominates the body that it moves was the conceptual thinking and more aesthetic base on sublime for inspiration rather than the Narcissism of illustrating self-portraits.

My Photos: