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ArthurBlue — Lightness of Being
Published: 2019-12-23 20:27:51 +0000 UTC; Views: 5613; Favourites: 185; Downloads: 51
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Just found out you're back. That already really made me a happy new year. All the best, Arthur, and may your work cast away all shades of gray from all the worlds (that sounded a lot better in my mind).
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Glad to see You safe and sound and creative, Arthur (and much earlier I read Your explanation of a long pause). Visually, it's fine, a pleasure to look at (maybe the girl's body needs a skin texture not to look plastic) . But I cannot help being dogmatic here. In the earlier image already referred to, The Sky is the Limit, the girl has a motive and a target (undefined since the concept doesn't demand this) that make her move. Now the character is acting too; she's holding a... a hardened clay blob. What for? She's playing with the object, she demonstrates "lightness of being", okay. Why not a ship container, a piano, a window frame, an elephant kid (with its legs upward) - smth from everyday life? This time I need some humor (maybe not Your realm, in a deliberate principle). Once I was impressed by a banal "surreal" picture by a terrifically prolific 3D artist in Flickr (Anita Witt): a train reaches the end of the rails (on the brink of a cliff, which cannot be in reality) and falls down into the sea. The charming trick is made by the title: "Oops..."
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Thanks for your comment and for your continued interest in my work. You touched some important points, let me try to address them.
- Skin: in fact it has a texture but under a strong desert sun, and at this distance from the camera, human skin tends to lose details. That's why I slightly enhanced some other visible features, such as the knee, elbow and a hint of a shape in her triceps. The texture of skin is more noticeable in close-ups and under a controlled studio lighting, such as this other image I made some years ago. But I recognize what you say, I will try to improve next time.
- Humor: in my mind, the search for beauty (my main endeavor) and humor are completely incompatible. If during the creation of one of my images, I think that some aspect of that image may be seen with humor, I always try my best to remove it entirely, or, if that proves to be impossible, I abandon that image completely. There was a comment in this image, about "helium dirt clods", that almost made me delete the image from the gallery. If there are more similar comments, I will surely do it because it will mean that I failed. In my mind, the pursuit for beauty is too serious to be mixed up with humor.
- "What for": that, my friend, is the "million euro question". 
-- Detail #1: the rock shape and color are vaguely similar to a real human heart, just a hint to it; if you didn't notice it, maybe I was too subtle.
-- Detail #2: why a rock and not some other ordinary object? Because in a rock I can make deep "scars" and "cuts", like this one has, and these can easily go unnoticed as a natural part of the rock, even though they are deep. If I had any other object and applied "scars" and "cuts" to it, you would immediately notice it, it wouldn't be subtle.
-- Detail #3: her weight, and hence that of the rock as well, are all supported by a seemingly delicate flower. How can a flower sustain all that weight?...
-- Detail #4: what is a lone flower doing in the middle of a desert?...
-- Detail #5: the flower and her dress are almost exactly the same color.
Normally, most details in my images have a reason to exist in the context of the concept. Of course, some details are just for "world building" (in this image, this is the case of the small scattered plants and the distant mountains) but most of the details are not really "details", they are part of the concept building.
Sometimes, even the lack of details are part of the concept building... Maybe you didn't notice that this was probably my only image where I didn't write absolutely anything in the image comments.
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As always, you are perfectly logical and consistent. Sometimes I wonder how your analysis could show up if applied to visual art works of others… or to fiction. No slightest objections, just a few more remarks. Indeed, beauty presence leaves no room for humor, although one can speak of some elegant and beautiful samples of humor, thus, scholastically, humor can possess beauty of its own.
(Seemingly) weightless objects are loved by many artists; this device is not new… and what is new? Everybody says “nothing” as far as visual arts are concerned. M. Parkes has many such objects – rocks, bricks, metal chains etc., his cold ideal world is built on such stuff. And this world looks a bit that of the dead. I was looking through a blog page with pictures of a good Soviet painter, realistic but with a conditional element in manner, and among traditional comments like “it is all about harmony of man and nature, joy of existence” I noticed a couple of cute remarks. “The characters don’t speak, don’t smile, and don’t look at each other – it’s about loneliness!” And a woman’s short suggestion: “I’ve got it, they all are dead!” Parkes may be, in such a context, even inhuman in the core. And your ideal world is very different! However, ideal things are often linked to death, in philosophy and art considerations. Artists, preoccupied with rendering “high [that is, again, ideal] spirituality” (a popular device is making figures vertically stretched, thinner than in reality), now and then overdo it, and here we are, with ghosts instead of live humans around. Generally, can living beings be ideal, even in imagery? I like this phrase, though I doubt its correctness: “Life is a disease of matter, thinking is a disease of life”. It’s a citation from the novel “The Lame Horse” (I didn’t read it) by brothers Strugatsky, Soviet sci-fi writers; though used to be considered sort of dissidents (I think their political hints in the novels are boring), they enjoyed large circulation of their books and remain to be popular.
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"L'insoutenable légèreté de la pierre" very beautiful and surréalistic vision ... bravo!
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Beware of Helium Filled Dirt Clods.
Merry Christmas.
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Great work,
reminds me at:
The Sky is the Limit
Thanks for this new inspiration ...,
and wish You a relaxing Christmas time,
⛩🤗🎏
the Horst from Germany
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Hello Arthur
Thank You for Your in detail description of the creation process.
Overall, the two pictures if regarded as a series of a metamorphosis reminded me of two of my favorite works by SciFi authors,
which I have planned to read again after more than 30 years.
Maybe You know them too:
David Lindsay’s “A Voyage to Arcturus”,
and Philip José Farmer “World of Tiers”, in German “World of a thousand levels”.
Thanks again and some edifying days,
the Horst
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