(All photographs are taken by me; the top one is taken at The Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the bottom ones are taken at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago)
This is beautiful to me, and this idea is something which feels just beyond my reach (not in a bad way, but I will explain): lines of the body coming together and apart, as if he, the falling man (I can no longer remember exactly the title or the artist, but I think they were plates depicting the fall of men, somehow - horses were also falling in this one) was enmeshed in a net that perfectly contoured his body.
Can we do this with cloth? Or, is it possible to do this again, to make another skin? It comes back to what I have written a little of before, La Piel Que Habito, but a little differently? The body as a landscape, and these lines like the lines of a topographical map.
Image found here. It is so large so you can actually see what is going on, but it is so similar to me. I tried making something like this on a figure study, cutting paper to be like mountains, a landscape. Also, I was thinking about... something like this during high school in Hong Kong: how a human face (and the body, also) can have lines in it that speak of something else. Something we don't know already! And it is not in the wrinkles, as they tell of experience, but rather... a secret language of the body! A language we speak without even knowing it! It is not body language either, but very different, in the very veins that lie in us.
Another reason for posting the photographs I took at the Met is that I really like muscles. I have been trying to get some of my own... Don't know if my body is made for that, but it is interesting nonetheless. Anyways, so I like muscles, a lot, especially on girls. It just looks so interesting and unexpected, I suppose because female bodies are "meant" to be soft. These images of Lisa Lyon, a female bodybuilder, taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, are really interesting to me:
This is one of them, I found it here.
Because:
1. the image from the Met is of a very muscular person.
2. I enjoy muscles. They are great, and I think they are beautiful, also.
3. bodies and writing and people and mountains: I really like photographing mountains, and people in them. I showed someone a photograph I had made this summer, and it was of the mountains. They said, with the snow, it looked like a great Orca whale.
I don't know where this is going, but body + topography + maps + landscapes + language is probably already greatly explored in art, but I like it, so I will keep thinking about it.
I also feel as though my posts disintegrate more and more the longer they get...
Well, tomorrow I might write about colour!