A busy week in Artlandia...
Work on the mini project continues with week 4 of 5 blocks/plates a week, #16 - 20
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| one more rat |
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| Full sheet (9 x 12" - oy!) of drapery working from the research trip to the Cloisters three weeks ago |
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| Wheel of Fortune |
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| Temoerance |
The Temperance is a try-again of my very first plate on aluminum from July (which I over etched - oops! Lesson learned ;) ). For the Wheel of Fortune card, I didn't love the most common iconography in which the wheel takes up the majority of the composition, so I did some digging, looking at different portrayals of Fortuna and Tyche. I especially like the one below by (Hans) Selald Beham, a student of Durer. I made a few changes - adding the blind fold, lengthening the wings, changing the boat to a contemporary one, editing out the man sitting on the wheel and the weird grieve things on her legs, and making her stand on the ball (like Durer's version), adding the piece of hair in the front (the "forelock of Chance") and showing her approaching rather than going away. Also, [Nerd Alert:] I decided to change the palm frond in the hand, which is an attribute of Tyche - the Greek Goddess who most closely relates to the Roman Fortuna. She often appears on coins from Antioch, (a nice example showing her standing is this tetradrachm in the Art Institue of Chicago ). But I think Tyche has more overtones of predestination (the palm frond being a symbol shared by Nike, Victory.) So I decided to change it out for the coin bag (and I guess coins were on my mind ;) ).
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Haha - and now that I've said waaaaay more than anyone every wanted to know about that...Onward!
I completed a Fledermaus, everything glued down and sewn on...
...and did all the in painting, drawing and painting sections of the pieces so that they blend together more seemlessly - a good before/after example:
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| before |
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| after |
And I started the last Fledermaus piece for En Masse II :
One of my favorite things about this is the forepaws - I think I captured the anatomy well after studying the taxidermy at the Berkshire Museum . It's a step up in terms of the carving too - in the first rat blocks, the shape of the paws is defined by the edge (by cutting them out), but with this one, it's controlling the carving around them - upping the level of difficulty for a more complex pose - Thumbs Up!