situations
Situations
Scenes depicting life situations
The Artist with a Portrait of Her Mother
I find portraits are interesting and good practice in getting a graphic to capture a recognizable face and/or expression. But in most cases there is a limited appeal for portraits. It is hard to convince someone that a portrait is anything but a reproduction. After all the original is written in magnetic bits and only copies exist in tangible form. So I have been exploring situations that I think might have situational interest. Here is an example. The subjects are a mother and daughter. The mother appears in a portrait by her daughter as a stern strong willed no nonsense person. The likeness is moving, almost scary. The artist has captured the character of her mother, respectful, but also reflecting her feelings toward her. We can wonder if the painting might be the artist's tangible metaphor for conscience.
Whatever symbolism may be interpreted in the painting of the Mother, The daughter appears totally happy with her life as an artist and has apparently managed to deal with whatever residual influence her mother's opinion has had on her life.
Needlepoint Tape
I like groupings of people doing something because it gives you a way to visually tell a story. Here are three artists one of them a resident of Lowertown. They are discussing Needlepoint Tape which is a double sided tape used to mount fabric with structure (such as a needlepoint) in a frame or shadowbox. The conversation was so intense they did not notice me snapping a reference photo. It was January or February so the two visitors are wearing coats.
Garden Menace
This is one is also a situation but it is totally fabricated. I was taking a course from a comic book artist and we had discussed the popularity in modern graphic novels and movies of using extreme camera points of view. The exaggerated depth of field forces the eye to interpret the image as 3 dimensional. To give me some ground level view point reference shots, I had my wife "threaten" the camera with a squirt bottle. Naturally, being a stickler for realism, she had to actually squirt me with it. Unfortunately, my knee jerk reaction meant I missed the action shot. The Aroids are house plants and probably toxic to the cockroach sized aphid I have placed in the cross hairs of the sprayer. I call this graphic Garden Menace. I left it up to the observer to determine just what was the menace .
Encounter in Red
Street scenes are great sources of interesting situations. it may not be the original subject of your photo that is most interesting but something in the background. Here is an interpretation of two figures encountering each other during the summer season in Asheville, NC. The guy is dressed to attract notice, and seems to be accosting people as a public service to warn them of a dire future that he knows about because of his special connections. The girl is also dressed to attract attention, but in a more conventional way. She is passing out leaflets that I edited out of the drawing and appears to be focused on getting past this character. They appear to have little in common beyond their hair color, clothing color choices and this chance encounter. Light generally is not in the ideal location to give just the right shadows to "shape" a figure. In the strange light of the cartoon you have to invent the light angles that "reveal" the 3d shapes you want to express. in doing the girl's dress I had to imagine a light source that would show her shape and suggest the fluidness of her skirt. I was pleased with the result.