Monday, September 15, 2008

A Step Back

Back to basics
Starting from scratch
Returning to your roots
Going back to a simpler time
finding yourself
All these quotations were not made in vain, there is a reason for them.
I don't know if you noticed (prob not) but my mind has been all over the place, where are the butterfly people going? I love the henna girl in the last blog, but many of the others do not create the same sense of excitement when I behold them. I feel as if I've exhausted my idea bank and do not want to make fairies, I want to design figures. The last figure was designed, I want to paint on more figures in different ways with different colors but also want to make figures with significance that will be taken seriously. So what to do to begin all of this? Nothing seems to help, looking at photos online of people and other artists polymer clay sculptures only depresses me, so much frivolity. So what did I do to break this ice?
I went back..... WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY back
22,000 years before Christ to be exact, that is quite some time ago!
Yes, I began looking at art history and found the ever popular and super ancient Venus of Willendorf, (apparently now known as Woman from Willendorf due to misconceptions about it being tied to pagan religion). This carved limestone figure is only four inches and some tall so I can definitely relate to its size, and its super old, one of the oldest early human figures ever found dating at 22,000 or 21,000 BCE.
What I did was made Venus, or should I say the figure of Willendorf? My own version of course which is seated and lacking the protruding vagina, has feet, and is not carved. I did however keep the texture stone-like with many pit holes and also painted the figure with different shades of paint to give it more depth and tiny bits of contrast. My plan is to actually evolve this figure (not literally this one, but to make others) into a present-day butterfly person, but the process should not be rushed, this is the "first" but in the coming weeks there should be more as they transcend into something tangible and meaningful to me.


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