Ophelia's Left Breast, Volume 3
Herewith, "Ophelia's Left Breast" ...
Wow. I love its stark grandeur. For the record, it measures 29x45. Inches. Roughly.
For you close readers, the whole idea of this odd dimension was to custom-fit a painting into the shiny black frame I found next to somebody's garbage can on my way to the studio one day a couple of months ago. As I noted at the time, being an artist is one of the few professions that makes digging around in other people's garbage okay. Private eyes jump to mind as well. Plus the people that are trying to steal your credit card numbers.
Anyway, back to the grandeur of the thing.
The whole idea is to now travel to Pearl Paint on Canal Street and purchase perhaps a quart of clear acrylic varnish, if that's the right word. I will then varnish, if that's the right word, the whole thing, frame and all, from top to bottom. Like it was laminated or something.
I must admit I'm in love with the whole varnish-the-frame-to-make-it-part-of-the-painting thing. Also, when the varnish goes on it has a noticeable effect of the painting itself. Colors you didn't quite see before suddenly pop out. If you look closely at "Ophelia's Left Breast" you will see that, in addition to black, white and assorted grays, the thing also has red, green, yellow and blue.
As further illustration of that fact, here is where we stood this morning:
And then here ...
And so on.
So you can see it's been a productive day. But all that said, what remains to be done, in addition to the varnish--preceding it, in fact--is the scrawling of the title on the face of the painting. And here the jury is out, dear reader.
Let's look at the almost finished painting again:
There's an argument to be made for not writing anything on it. Imbue it with an elegant formality, if you will. And I know you know that I tend to write stuff on the damned things for no apparent reason. Which certainly is an instinct that runs counter to the whole elegant formality thing. But it also seems to me that part of the gestalt of a mammogram is that there is stuff written on it. Names and dates--stuff like that.
I mean, who knows what all that stuff means, but it seems like it belongs.
So that remains unresolved.
And as if that weren't enough, my friend Peter forcibly argued that I should pass on the women of Shakespeare and go back to the idea of the cheerleaders' names. "Kathy [Redacted]'s Left Breast." Something like that.
The smarmy audacity of which, I must admit, makes me giggle. But honestly, is nothing easy?
Wow. I love its stark grandeur. For the record, it measures 29x45. Inches. Roughly.
For you close readers, the whole idea of this odd dimension was to custom-fit a painting into the shiny black frame I found next to somebody's garbage can on my way to the studio one day a couple of months ago. As I noted at the time, being an artist is one of the few professions that makes digging around in other people's garbage okay. Private eyes jump to mind as well. Plus the people that are trying to steal your credit card numbers.
Anyway, back to the grandeur of the thing.
The whole idea is to now travel to Pearl Paint on Canal Street and purchase perhaps a quart of clear acrylic varnish, if that's the right word. I will then varnish, if that's the right word, the whole thing, frame and all, from top to bottom. Like it was laminated or something.
I must admit I'm in love with the whole varnish-the-frame-to-make-it-part-of-the-painting thing. Also, when the varnish goes on it has a noticeable effect of the painting itself. Colors you didn't quite see before suddenly pop out. If you look closely at "Ophelia's Left Breast" you will see that, in addition to black, white and assorted grays, the thing also has red, green, yellow and blue.
As further illustration of that fact, here is where we stood this morning:
And then here ...
And so on.
So you can see it's been a productive day. But all that said, what remains to be done, in addition to the varnish--preceding it, in fact--is the scrawling of the title on the face of the painting. And here the jury is out, dear reader.
Let's look at the almost finished painting again:
There's an argument to be made for not writing anything on it. Imbue it with an elegant formality, if you will. And I know you know that I tend to write stuff on the damned things for no apparent reason. Which certainly is an instinct that runs counter to the whole elegant formality thing. But it also seems to me that part of the gestalt of a mammogram is that there is stuff written on it. Names and dates--stuff like that.
I mean, who knows what all that stuff means, but it seems like it belongs.
So that remains unresolved.
And as if that weren't enough, my friend Peter forcibly argued that I should pass on the women of Shakespeare and go back to the idea of the cheerleaders' names. "Kathy [Redacted]'s Left Breast." Something like that.
The smarmy audacity of which, I must admit, makes me giggle. But honestly, is nothing easy?
posted by Geoffrey at 3:52 PM
2 Comments:
Since Ophelia was about sixteen, perhaps a slight upward tilt would be more appropriate ??
Ok . . . as a contribution to art and strictly from memory, there was Kathy, Kerry, Amy, Marsha, Pam, Kristen, Sally, Janet, Lynne and probably some others. Also I could be wrong.
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