When the makeup comes off.
A title I landed on after creating this second iteration.
I didn’t have a specific idea in mind, only that I wanted to create. This is when I go through my images until something catches my attention, allowing me to find a starting point. It was the end of a long day. Long in things that needed to be done, and in things that kept being added. Creating last night felt a little like a deep exhale, even though all things were not completed.
Creating
In my first image, I started with this portrait and tried several images until I landed on the clouds. I like the blues, how they match her eyes. I like the juxtaposition in feeling tones. I like the smearing effect created in a digital app. I like the painterly texture and how that accentuates the smearing/melting. But it didn’t feel quite right.
I shared this with the model, and we laughed a little about how it doesn’t make sense. But it doesn’t need to make immediate sense. I retained some of the pieces, steps along the way, to reuse on the second try.
Reflection
“Metaphor unites reason and imagination. Reason involves, at the very least, categorization, entailment, and inference. Imagination, in one of its many aspects, involves seeing one kind of thing in terms of another kind of thing – metaphorical thought. Metaphor is thus imaginative rationality. Metaphor is one of our most important tools for trying to comprehend partially what cannot be comprehended totally: our feelings, aesthetic experiences, moral practices, and spiritual awareness.”
-Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
When the makeup comes off.
The first image is a more literal representation of makeup coming off, the second one more subtle. Both speak to me about how it feels to remove the pretense.
“Each art medium picks out certain dimensions of our experience and excludes others. Artworks provide new ways of structuring our experience in terms of aspects of our sense experiences: color, shape, texture, sound, etc.) Works of art provide new experiential gestalts and, therefore, new coherences.”
– Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
