The Forest of Dreams IV: Guardians of the Moth

The Guardians of the Moth:, above: I concieve a special guard consisting of eight such cutouts (see below).

The Forest of Dreams III: Hallowed be the Glory of Moth

Three more from the Forest of Dreams.

I realise that I revisiting ideas which I attempted to tackle with in The Kingdom of Moth.

Sometimes an idea has to incubate quietly: I'd attempted to do something related to the horror and gamour of moths before, but hadn't felt quite satisfied with the results, which were too cartoonish, overstated in their expressionism. Now the time is ripe capture the glory of moth in the language of Polish peasant cutouts and Art Noveau perversity.

The Forest of Dreams: drawings

Two drawings for a paper cutout sculpture piece which I shall work on over the next few days.

Three characters in search of a tableau

These are threee drawings of characters who will one day become made into cutouts, and set up as a tableau.

What I really need is a jigsaw and some light hardboard. Then I can cut out profiles to paint with the characters: doing such cutting work in this apartment just isn't feasable. But perhaps it will be some day: what I can do now is store up ideas for that day.

Another option is to use these characters in a painting: though what I like about the idea of having them as cutout two dimensinal "dolls" is the toy-like aspect that they'd have (I am extremely fond of children's toys, and there used to be produced pressed tin soldiers called "flats"; I'm also a big fan of the toy theatre).

I have had these ideas for many years, but often felt deterred not just by lack of a workspace but by my lack of a narrative within which to place my figures. I have decided not to care too much: the narrative can look after itself.

Slow week

It has been a doleful week. My lack of energy worsened by the coldness of this apartment which seems to have the effect of immobilising me close to our one, tiny bar heater: flats in Southern Brazil don't often have heating, even though it's always quite coold in the winter.

Anyway, with a view to shifting my conception of what art production is onto the digital age, I cleared out old photo files from the computer. I installed the counters (below)- though for some reason I do not really trust them. And I continued work on the mobiles, cutting out more shapes and considering better how to use them- including a wider varierty of shapes and experimenting with flash, and different coloured filters.

The thing is not to lose the naive, folk art feel of the cutouts in the course of photographing them. If the photograph is too highly manipulated this gets lost and the result is like an overproduced live recording of a performance.

You can see the work so far, here-

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28509471@N05/sets/72157621606358902/

Where do we go from here?

I enjoy making the cutouts, and I believe they can be a striking expressive tool but the question is, what to do with them? They seem too insubstantial to function as art.

I shall play with 1. "Tableau"- essentially mini installations of cutouts and 2. Mobiles.

In addition, I am trying to deal with the difficulties of producing more work which will, most likely, simply go into storage, and is unlikely to sell. I haven't space to store more work.

The solution is to work digitally. To treat the artwork as simply the means towards producing photographic digital images, then discard it once its finished with.And by putting the work on the Internet, it is accessible to the public.

I gain a great deal from the support of people, usually strangers, on Flickr, Facebook and Deviantart. They only know my work through its dematerialised pixellated presence on a screen. Does that matter?

Cutouts

I spent today working on these cutouts, and then photographing them.

My original idea was to work on a mobile, and I may still do this. However, I might also try to make miniature stage sets with them. For that to make sense, I'd need some sort of narrative structure, though I could possible just make them as "Tableau" illustrating, say "The Four Seasons", or "States of Mind".

Perhaps they are sufficient in themselves- something tells me, however, that they are not.