2015 ARTIST WRITER MASHUP: "Why I Am Not An Artist"
Throughout the month of April, I will be posting about my process as part of Lamplighter Magazine's 2015 Artst Writer Mashup, in which a group of writers from across the country are paired up with a single illustration by New Jersey's Lauren Clarke, and, by the end of the month, will have produced one piece of writing in conversation with this assigned image. To see some examples of Clarke's fabulous illustrations, visit her Etsy page (because you may NOT see the one I will be working from just yet!). To hear from other writers involved with this project, go to the comments section of Lamplighter's Artist Writer Mashup posts.
Twice a week, I will be responding to prompts and questions on my process and my relationship to the image.
My first prompt involves these thought-provoking questions, and below them are my responses:
What is the illustration's composition?
A white background. A large ostrich in the left-center of the image, with her head pointing straight down, disappearing at her neck's midway point into the top of a pyramid. Her head emerges again from the side of the pyramid and faces us, turned just slightly to the left (her right). We can see her left eye, and the side of her beak. In front of her and behind are two more pyramids. The one in the middle, the one she disappears into, is the largest. The one in the front is the darkest. The one in the back is the lightest. Her long legs are positioned on either side of the first two pyramids. Below the pyramids, watercolors in three shades of brown leak down into white.
How is it shaded and colored?
The ostrich's body is a black, scratchy complex of lines and texture. Near her rump, there is more whitespace, and the feathers are rounder. Starting with the midsection of her body and leading toward her neck, the lines get closer together and less discrete, and the feathers get sharper-looking, shaped more like pointed arrowheads. Her body is really a mess of clustered texture, and therefore almost gross––in the way birds are sometimes. Her legs are white with some yellow down toward her feet. They are speckled with sparse little hairs and bumps––the very definition of "chicken skin." Her neck, or what we can see of it, looks like this too. The pyramids, going from darkest to lightest from front to back, are shaded with geometric lines and rectangles. Below them, as I mentioned, are long drips and swathes of brown falling down.
How does it make you feel?
At first, I thought: "Ew. So much bird." And then I began to delight in the confusion of space and scale that occurs where the ostrich's head disappears into and reemerges from the pyramid. It feels like two universes colliding, and yet maintaining their boundaries. And the brown drips, as you may be able to tell, are my favorite: they seem to validate my feelings of sublimity.
What do you think you can learn about the artist through these choices?
She is teaching me something about the use of scale, and of juxtaposition of logics of scale. She is also teaching me not to fear the whitespace, and not to fear the gross scratchy blackness, or the necessary stink of bird bodies, or the unknowableness of pyramids.
What do you recognize about yourself as not being the artist?
I have witnessed my initial response to the image––ew, a bird––and my subsquent delight in continuing looking. I have witnessed my own acceptance of another's imagined space, and not in the way that I'm used to entering another's imagined space (as in, not through language, but through image). It's fun to Not Be The Artist.
