November and Remembrance

It's my birthday this month, and I totally forgot about that until this morning. It's sometime in the middle, and I was more distracted by the voting stuff that happens at the beginning, and the Decembering stuff that happens at the end.

We talked in Art Readings class this morning about how artists can overexplain or underexplain their work; being naturally curious I guess, and having documented my artistic process a lot in my graphic design process books, I guess I not only prefer overexplanation but also do it myself. A work should be able to stand on its own, but if a metaphor is overly obvious just by looking at it, or if a metaphor actually explains itself in the piece itself, it's not doing its job being a metaphor very well. Having the metaphor stand on its own, but having the symbolism spelled out elsewhere, strikes the most profound balance. To me.

I've got an image, originally conceived as an illustration for one of the pieces I'm designing for for the Outlet, but which is just waaay too opaque for the message. The theme of the piece is this: coming to terms with memory, realizing that it's a part of you. Over time the image evolved, picked up a lot of visual baggage via contact with and incorporation of my own visual metaphors, until it was too complicated to serve its original illustrative purpose. Which happens in my graphic design more than I'd care to admit. Like, always, in other words.

The metaphor for the past is a tail, behind you yet a part of you. Animals gnaw off their own limbs for their survival when caught in traps, and that's how this animal is deciding to deal with its pas-- um, tail. The fox tries to gnaw its tail off, but its teeth are also the teeth of a trap, and the trap is coming out of the back of its head in the first place: the fox itself is its own trap, a wire cage, with its tail weaving up around from the base of its spine to the back of its skull.

I'm doing an intaglio print of the image for printmaking class. This is just a test print of the hardground progress; I did softground this evening for texture, and will do aquatint in the morning for value.

What I hope for it to look like (mocked up in Photoshop to gauge immersion times for the Aquatint.)

What's fascinating to me is how similar the cage imagery is to the dream I had which I've since also tried to recreate in my art, the dream where I was a caged animal, and the cage contorted me to anthropomorphic form. There's a third cage image which has appeared in a couple disparate places in my notes/art, which I'd never thought to connect to the cage dream till now- the idea that the body itself is a Skinner box for the mind, and the mind is a Skinner box for the soul. And the world is a Skinner box for the body. You think you're free only when you're being conditioned the most.

Now that I've noticed the symbolism underlying the symbolism, I'm not sure if I'll stop getting ideas about cages, or if they'll start coming in greater force... Of course, I get ideas about masks a lot, and the symbolism of that is obvious... 

With my mask series, though, especially, the ideas are the ones that find me, and not the other way around. I suppose it is also as here: though I did explicitly track down and find the idea, use the symbolism of the tail as your past and fit that into some method of dealing with it, the cage symbolism came externally- even when I decided that the tail couldn't be caught in some exterior trap, because it's not the past itself that prevents us from moving on but our memories of it, the idea didn't necessarily call for cages- but that's what showed up as part of it, for some reason.