Butterfly and Shark - a self portrait.

I have already drawn and painted many portraits. My biggest project here was painting 12 characters from the early Harry Potter Films. While I have painted these portraits I realized that the character appears to get hold of me, which was a bit scary. I thought I would never paint a person I know personally in this intense way, nor would I paint me.
Yet, when thinking about doing a collage of a person after a black and white photography I decided to take photographs of myself and to try a self-portrait.

 I did not know that this work will be so demanding. I cut out snippets of a black and white newspaper for hours and arranged them after the values of the photograph. Then I realized that, if I will go on like this, the result will be a boring picture, like another photograph, just a bit out of focus. I decided to change the approach and looked for something to give the picture more vitality. I found two images of a butterfly and a shark and added them to the picture.
Then I covered the remaining surface of the paper with strokes of a light blue and a grey marker which improved the collage in a way that I knew it is time to stop working on it.

Apart from the long time I had to work on the collage to make it something interesting, it also was an adventure to look at myself in this intense way. To see how my nose or eyes look like was one thing, but I also got a kind of new relation to myself. It was like being together with a person for a long time without saying anything, but you definitely drew nearer to that person.

This post was inspired by an assignment of an art online course.

Word's Paradise

Watching a running lion and antelope in reality immediately leads to the association of the lion hunts and will hurt the antelope. Looking at a picture that depicts both animals running leaves more possibility interpreting to the viewer. The audience may imagine them playing around, just their knowledge about beast of prey and the prey itself may lead them again to a scene where the prey is chased. Two buildings from words  like 'running lion' and 'running antelope' leaves imagination more space. You even could imagine a different, paradise-like world in which both, lion and antelope are playing together. This is what the collage tries to convey.

I looked for animal shapes, each from different character: peaceful, wild, treasures ... I used a ballpoint pen of light blue color to draw the contours of the shapes on book pages and I cut them out.
After throwing them on a piece of paper I glued the shapes where they have ended up. In addition  I drew red curly lines to indicate a fantastic world, where delicate feathers and tentacles are part of the animals.
The animal shapes with the words in it are meant to be something between a word and a picture. The way they all have the same appearance except from the shape makes them on the one hand similar on the other hand different. I used chance to arrange them on the background paper. Animal shapes like animal words are meant to be equal and using chance guaranteed that I will not put any animal in a more important position, maybe according to the golden rule. On the collage predators exist side by side to prey like in paradise.
For this artwork I'm mostly inspired by Jean Arp who produced artwork using chance. He also used natural shapes, which but are different from my shapes, because they are more biomorphic like a kidney shape than being shapes of real creatures. I still wanted people to have in mind the category of predator and prey, which we think can live together just in paradise. A kidney shape could not have conveyed this.
I'm also inspired by the arrangement of animals in Rousseau's pictures, which often appears as if any being lives peacefully aside their neighbours. Just your imagination tells you if they do or not. You can continue the story in your own way.

When I cut shapes out of book pages some of the childlike Dada movement  also came into my artwork, while I was remembering that children love drawing on printed pages o cutting them, which is generally forbidden. I allowed me to ignore this value of the adult world, that Dadaists often refused. Still my artwork is not meant to be senseless, which it often was with Dada artists, but for the future I'm intrigued of making artwork which makes not much sense to the adult world, maybe especially to the war part of the adult world where it is not possible to peacefully live together.

The following shows some detail.

This post is associated with an online art course I currently attend.