Saturday, November 18, 2006

Fetish

When I made bracelets I often had large beads left over from old necklaces and couldn’t decide what to do with them. The idea came to me to make small puppet figures from these beads to be used a key chains or just decorations to hang from the belt or handbag. fter I had made a few, I though that it might be interesting to paint one of these bead puppets. I explored many poses my painted puppet could adopt including dancing and running. Somehow the pose of Christ on the cross appealed to me, as I intended to put a facial expression on the puppet of a slightly simpering, pleased with himself smile in stark contrast to the implication of the pose. studied many pictures of crucifixions to establish the exact body pose I wanted and to find one which would fit with the type of beads of the original puppet. The original puppet had dark blue beads mixed with a few silver ones. The background needed to be dramatic and contrasting so I chose much the same red I had used in the Mars picture as it also couldsymbolize blood. I originally painted the puppet in both form and colour very close to its original design, except that I couldn’t quite get the facial expression I was after, so I decided to leave this out. I had always intended to paint the puppet hanging from strings and decided after a couple of tries at painting string, to use real string. As the puppet was hanging in space I thought I needed some decoration at the level of the feet to fill in the space and balance the picture. Since I had already used string to hang the puppet from, I thought that coiled string would give both texture and visual impact. Once I had added a few coils, I realized that I had inadvertently attached 12 and was immediately struck by the relation the Apostles. The gray coils also needed some contrast so I added a black coil to symbolize Judas and the larger light blue one higher than the rest to symbolize Mary Magdalene. Once I had most of the painting done I realized that the head without the face was lacking interest, so I made many sketch of haloes, heads in boxes, and headdresses. In the end I settled on the simple pieces of string rather like a native American headdress. Once the picture was complete, I realized that it could almost be a “Fetish” or an object of power or worship, like a talisman kept at hand, a good luck charm, or a symbol of power and luck. The more I realized the spiritual nature of the idea, the more I realized that the symbols of many religions including Christianity are no different than ancient tribal fetishes.

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