Who doesn't love the Borg? The Borg always held a special place in my heart (the mechanical part) because despite their almost entirely ominous presence in Star Trek, there's something charming about them--almost silly.
This piece was created for a Star Trek/Star Wars-themed group show. Star Trek was sadly underrepresented because everyone is a Star Wars dork. I'll be the first to agree that the concept of a Borg Queen as seen in First Contact makes no sense, but she worked well for the image. I was going for the feeling of a propaganda poster, something advertising the pros of being assimilated. I kind of wanted to portray the Borg as they might see themselves, as kind of messianic, uniting the galaxy. Borg Queen herself was modeled on Mucha's females as well as Midna and some of the imagery* from from Zelda: Twilight Princess. I think I made the Queen much more stylish, plus I really like how the pixelated-type detailing of the dress came out.
I considered making some other sci-fi-themed images in the same stylistic vein, but was never able to. Honestly, I wouldn't know what to do.
*image credit Donna M. Evans, who I found via Google just now. That picture is super cute.
Okay, more fangirlism. I'm sorry.
No, I'm not.
Okay, so here's (probably) the last and most intricate piece I'll be displaying that has to do with Jeff the Killer. After viewing thousands of images of him and his supposed likeness on sites like deviantART, I found myself becoming irritated with many of the images because they seemed totally unrealistic, and I think I'm a hardcore realist at heart. So I decided, as I usually do when something pisses me off artistically, to take matters into my own hands.
This is the result. I first started off thinking about what would happen, after some time, to someone's face after they'd given themselves a Chelsea grin, and figured there would be a lot of scar tissue involved, as well as a considerable amount of regrowth. With a portion of the cheeks open past the natural boundaries of the mouth, someone like Jeff would also probably have something of a drooling problem. Ew. The eyes, of course, which are often portrayed as ringed in soot (the eyelids were, according to the Pasta, burned off with a lighter, though I still think that would cause irreparable damage to the eyeball itself), though after time they would only be surrounded by more scar tissue. I've seriously never thought about facial mutilation quite this much before.
The face itself is modeled after my own. One of the reasons why I like this character so much is because one of the core themes of his story is the concept of beauty, of finding one's own definition of beauty against societal odds, and relentlessly pursuing that idea. Thanks to my own body modifications, I've experienced the OH MY GOD WHAT DID YOU DO TO YOURSELF quite a number of times. It's hard to explain to someone who has a very fixed idea of what is and is not beautiful you idea of beauty, that beauty is subjective, not objective, and that one idea of beauty is no more or less valid than another. I also know how it is to feel as though the physicality you have is a liability, and how it feels to want to confront peoples' shitty and exploitative concepts of (female) beauty in an aggressive manner. There was one time, a long time ago now, when I had a passing fantasy about cutting my face open like that. I really did--I even wrote about it when I used to keep a journal. I'm not proud of it, but it's true. Nothing ever came of it because I have better self-control than that, but it's still part of my history.
If you don't know, a very distilled version of the Jeff story is that Jeff mutilated his own face and subsequently thought of himself as beautiful. This concept of challenging the commonly-held ideas of beauty, of forcing people to look at something they've been trained to see as ugly as something beautiful is interesting to me, because I do believe that the truly beautiful things are the things that make you think and feel deeply--and often, the truly beautiful things are going to make you uncomfortable, make you afraid, and make you hurt. You don't escape from real beauty unscathed. As I've said before, when it comes to creating art, I find it much more fulfilling for everyone to create something that is uncomfortable but stirring than pleasant but superficial. Beauty and terror and ugliness and transcendence, to me, are all wrapped up in another as facets of the human experience.
I also should tell you that I am way over-analytical and make a big philosophical deal out of things like Creepypastas.
And because of all that, Jeff looks something like me, with big lips, freckles, unkempt black hair, and dark circles under the eyes. I gave him light eyes, though, as it fit better with the original image. He's also got a tattoo for some reason, I couldn't tell you why, but I think it stemmed from needing something dark at the base of the image to balance out the hair.
From a technical standpoint, this is the first time I've used gloss medium (clear) on wood, which allowed me to work with the natural forms of the wood, which was nice. Besides, wood knots, like the one seen here, have a way of insinuating itself through many layers of paint, and so I figured I would work with it rather than fight it. I chose a pink scheme because it seemed natural, plus I really like what pink glazes do for skin tones. Because of the pink and the sort of low-brow inspiration for this piece, it's being categorized in the Trash body.Today I bought another one of these wooden ovals so that Jeff can have a companion.
Finally, a new oil painting. I have been shamefully remiss about painting, and so I'm thrilled to have a new one.
The working title for this is just "Little Maskies," which is stupid, but I'm having a hell of a time thinking of anything decent. It's oil (stand oil glazing) and glitter on canvas, and is based on a photograph I saw on Boyfriend's aunt and uncle's refrigerator in Pennsylvania. It was of their relatives or something on Easter, during an egg hunt, and they were wearing these weird masks and looking unsmiling into the camera. I only had a quick impression of the original, and this is what it became.
Photographing it was a pain; stand oil is so shiny that it's nearly impossible to get a picture without a glare. Even if you think the light is diffused and indirect, it'll show up as a huge, distracting glare in photos. After about 24,596,984 times, I finally got this one, and there's still a glare on the left side. But it's okay.
I've lately been into paintings with large areas of amorphous, atmospheric, washy colors, which are dominating the projects I'm currently working on. I have two actively going and two more in the unstarted phase. I haven't worked with stand oil in a while and I'm excited to start up again.
In terms of the themes I usually work with, this one is a bit different. I'm categorizing it under the Home collection, but it has a number of differences. For one thing, much of the Home body was not created using stand oil, and none of them involve glitter. Glitter has been heretofore reserved for the Trash collection, but it shows up here, in the masks. The figures are different, too. They share some of the silhouette qualities of hoodies, but, obviously, have no hoods. They still, however, retain their air of mystery, having part of their heads/faces covered.
I also have a real thing for trees silhouetted against the twilit sky. It's just so pretty.
