Images #2

With this piece i wanted to build off of my question about how passion influence not only your interaction with other people but interactions with yourself. I think seeing one's self is definitely an interaction with yourself. In ballet you are constantly looking in the mirror and judging youself, that's what the mirror is there for, to look at how you are doing a movemnt and it you see yourself doing it wrong, to fix it. This however can often turn self destructive and can turn into a vision of yourself that is really unrealistic. I wanted to show that through the two bodies but they are both pretty and then not only are they on a mirror showing reflection, but the mirror is cracked to show how the image one sees of themself is often fractured and distorted.

I used pencil to sketch it out at first then went in with oil pastel. I wanted to use oil pastel because it had bright colors and I feel like you can really play with color and highlights and shadows. I liked working with them also because the highlights and shadows can be colorful, much more so than you would ever see in real life, but it still looks like a shadow. I used different colors for the shadows of the two people but used similar highlight colors to show difference but that they are still very much connected. The mirror I used was very much experimental, I had never used mirror before but thought it would be perfect for connecting the idea of reflection.

I started out with a sketch of the people in a room as I often do. But then I realized that the people were really small and also their bodies seemed kind of disproportionate, they just didn't look quite right. I redid the larger person to be even bigger, because I wanted to emphasize that that kind of takes over often and it's hard to see yourself for what you really are. So I started the sketch of the bigger person all over again. Then after atempting to fix the smaller one, but couldnt seem to, I completely redrew her also. By that point also I realized I really didn't want to draw a background so I cut them out. I had some mirror that i was going to use for anothe project so I decided to use that. I wanted to crack it but everytime I hit it it just broke. I soon found though if I taped the back it would stay together. It took a couple hits to get the spider crack right but I found if I held it over a crack in the table and held the bit above the mirror before hitting it with the hammer it gave me a better crack. Finally I glued the figures on and struggled to photograph the mirror without myself in it.