|
I painted this illustration for Colin Tunstall at Los Angeles magazine. The article was a review of Alice Sebold's, "The Almost Moon."
In the story, Helen Knightly, a 49 year old art model, smothers and kills her mother. The mother, Clair Knightly, is suffering from senility and dementia. "Dementia,' says Helen, 'as it descends, has a way of revealing the core of the person affected by it. My mothers core was rotten like the brackish water at the bottom of a weeks old vase of flowers."
Helen speaks of her mothers undone chores, and tells how her mother would not leave the house unless she shrouded herself in blankets.
For this illustration, I decided to paint Helen as I imagined she might look while she murdered her mother. I wanted the first beat to be ambiguous; is she doing chores like making the bed, folding blankets, or is she killing someone?
I hired an art model to pose for the photo shoot. As it happens, the model had more than a little affinity for the story because her mother suffered from severe mental illness in real life.
I tried 3 different light sources; above, below, and straight on, finally choosing "above." I placed a football under the above-mentioned blanket at the models request, and she provided a very smart and appropriate costume.
I used a fairly straight-on angle of view because I wanted to access Helen's trapped face and hands. "Constrictive composition" provided some narrative tension by trapping the character in the composition with shadowy and architectural lines. Interior/exterior was used to create contrasting color and more constrictive lines, and I lovingly thought of Alfred Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt" as I painted the shadows dancing across the curtains and walls of the "sagging house." And finally, Francisco Goya's "Los Caprichos" was the inspiration for "trapping the lights" around the 2 focal points in the picture.
I painted this picture with FW acrylic inks, and Derwent watercolor pencils, on BFK Rives printmaking paper. The image was digitally scanned, tiled, and minimally rendered in Photoshop, then delivered as a digital file.
|
