#5
I’m trying to get away from making pretty pictures of fairies and it has been proving a little more difficult than I had initially anticipated.
I took a look at Paula Rego’s work that makes reference to Disney and turns it into darkened, semi-erotic versions of the bright and sparkly films we see on the television – such as Snow White and Pinocchio.
The project I thought was the most interesting, though, was the one based on the ‘Fantasia’ film – taking the idea of the Ostriches and turning them into a series of quite masculine, almost scary images of ballerinas, rather than the abstract, anthropomorphic use of the ostriches in the film.
She makes the idea almost perverse – taking away any innocence that Disney placed into the stories, and twisted them back into the dark roots from which they originated.
Bearing in mind the dark roots, I’ve taken a closer look at Grimm’s fairy tales (and have finally gotten my hands on my copy of Andersen’s tales), and reading through a few of them it’s almost scary to see the difference between what we’re shown in films and what the stories were originally – I’ve said this before, but it’s amazing how much darker the stories in the book are! They teach morals rather than paint a picture of justice and happiness, and would not necessarily be considered suitable to be told to children in today’s society because of their content – I read the tale ‘The Pink Flower’, which tells of some particularly horrific scenes of a character being forced to eat hot coals until flames spewed from their mouth, and then was cut into pieces as punishment for his misdeeds (he was the villain, but this is beside the point). It makes me realise that even when good does win in these stories, they are not always the gracious characters we make them out to be – there is evil in everyone, and I think that it’s this message that I want to get across through the depiction of traditional Fae in my work. They weren’t always the nice little creatures that we think them to be today.
I’ve pretty much forced myself to make my work bigger so that I free myself up a bit and can actually create environments, rather than just a load of dancing fairies that don’t mean anything much.
I think that be doing this I can get a better feel for what my work will look like when I start to take it further and make it even bigger using my computer. By the end of this I want to potentially make detailed, digital images that will stretch the entire height of my studio wall – literally engulfing the viewer and making them part of the world that I am showing.
Fingers crossed that it will actually work out that way.
