fragments
Fragments
What this project is all about
Fragments 001 Overview
“Fragments” is quadriform with each quartern being a separate piece but related to, and complementing, the other three. No one has dominance but the whole is designed to be mounted on a central pivot so it may be revolved to make any quartern pre-eminent by being placed top right and correctly orientated.
The quarterns, in no particular order are: a conventional drawing of the figure, a mosaic, an extreme close up of a very small part of the figure and an ekphrastic drawing of imagined boulders representing the pose.
The conventional drawing uses sepia shades and is executed in conté pencils. This follows traditional techniques as used by many artists of the past. (eg William Mulready)
The mosaic uses just 576 tiles and just 6 shades to provide minimal information from which the viewer can interpret the scene. Inspiration has been taken from works by Salvadore Dali and Chuck Close. It has been executed with the help of the computer. Squares were ‘painted’ on screen, printed on sheets of adhesive paper, using a colour laser printer, and assembled on the card backing.
The extreme close-up is intended to show the detail missing from one of the tesserae of the mosaic. It is an enlarged photograph taken with a digital camera using 12 million pixels (cf the 6 million cones in the human eye) to capture every detail. But note, the print is also composed of pixels (which are themselves microscopic tesserae from a palette of 24 million colours. (I have calculated that if I were able to ‘paint’ that number of pixels from that palette (which is more than the human eye can distinguish) it would take four million years to complete!)
The ‘boulders’ was inspired by a work by Henry Moore and "Metamorphosis" by Salvadore Dali. It was executed by making a crude clay sculpture of the model and dismembering it into constituent parts: head, thorax, abdomen and limbs. The four most salient portions of this pose were considered to be the head, thorax and legs. Those pieces were smoothed off and drawn (using grey shades of conté) as if four boulders suspended in space roughly placed in approximate orientation to each other.
Thus the pose fragments within the quarterns and the viewer is encouraged to work on reassembling the whole.
Many thanks to one of the best models I've ever worked with for her help in my realising this project.
Chaira is a freelance life model who may be contacted by artists by following this link.