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Description
Model: Andrea
Body Painting: Me
Collaging: Myself and Andrea

Part of a series of bodypainting projects I plan on doing, each representing a different artistic medium, this one being writing.

Writing is one of the art forms where the artist disappears nearly entirely from the finished work. While many people might have heard of A Clockwork Orange, it is doubtful that the majority of them would know that the author is Anthony Burgess. Although this is not always the case, I wanted to capture the transparency of the writer, blended in with the intricacies of their creations. Like most artists, they are also bound by their need to create, to write, so even as the words are a part of the model in this picture, they lock her into place as they span her body, almost as shackles to her craft. She has become one with the writing, a part of it as it takes on a life of its own. I also wanted to show how writing is chaos - there are hundreds of thousands or words, but the writer's job is to find the right ones through intrinsic understanding of the complexities and subtleties of language. This piece represents specifically the contemporary writer, so I chose quotes from contemporary pieces of literature to stand out, representing the writer's ability to find coherency and genius out of what would seem a mess to others. In choosing the quotes, I wanted it to be so that the lines do not necessarily make any sense out of context, but are provoking and emotionally charged when read within the piece of writing from which they belong. In this way, it is relevant only to the art of writing, rather than distracting viewers with clever sayings that could be meaningful or comparable to their own lives. In addition, the quotes interlock with one another, scrabble style, to show the constant referencing and borrowing and building-off-one-another that goes on in literature, as is the trend with all the arts.

List of quotes:

"I am, I am, I am." - The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
"You don't understand the context!" - A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
"DON'T PANIC" - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
"Keep passing the open windows." - The Hotel New Hampshire (John Irving)
"like a hook into an eye" - You Fit Into Me (Margaret Atwood)
"The horror! The horror!" - Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
"there is a place where the sidewalk ends" - Where the Sidewalk Ends (Shel Silverstein)
"2+2=5" - 1984 (George Orwell)
"It's a dangerous business going out your front door" - The Fellowship of the Ring (J.R.R. Tolkien)
"take down the moon and dismantle the sun" - Funeral Blues (W.H. Auden)
"A gramme is better than a damn." - Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
"Petals on a wet, black bough." - In a Station of the Metro (Ezra Pound)
"So it goes." - Slaughterhouse V (Kurt Vonnegut)
"i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)" - i carry your heart with me (E.E. Cummings)
"Burn, burn, burn." - On The Road (Jack Kerouac)
"Not with a bang but a whimper." - The Hollow Men (T.S. Eliot)
"Let be be finale of seem" - The Emperor of Ice Cream (Wallace Stevens)
"42" - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
"It's history. It's poetry." - The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake." - Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk)

Description
Model: Andrea
Body Painting: Me
Collaging: Myself and Andrea

Part of a series of bodypainting projects I plan on doing, each representing a different artistic medium, this one being writing.

Writing is one of the art forms where the artist disappears nearly entirely from the finished work. While many people might have heard of A Clockwork Orange, it is doubtful that the majority of them would know that the author is Anthony Burgess. Although this is not always the case, I wanted to capture the transparency of the writer, blended in with the intricacies of their creations. Like most artists, they are also bound by their need to create, to write, so even as the words are a part of the model in this picture, they lock her into place as they span her body, almost as shackles to her craft. She has become one with the writing, a part of it as it takes on a life of its own. I also wanted to show how writing is chaos - there are hundreds of thousands or words, but the writer's job is to find the right ones through intrinsic understanding of the complexities and subtleties of language. This piece represents specifically the contemporary writer, so I chose quotes from contemporary pieces of literature to stand out, representing the writer's ability to find coherency and genius out of what would seem a mess to others. In choosing the quotes, I wanted it to be so that the lines do not necessarily make any sense out of context, but are provoking and emotionally charged when read within the piece of writing from which they belong. In this way, it is relevant only to the art of writing, rather than distracting viewers with clever sayings that could be meaningful or comparable to their own lives. In addition, the quotes interlock with one another, scrabble style, to show the constant referencing and borrowing and building-off-one-another that goes on in literature, as is the trend with all the arts.

List of quotes:

"I am, I am, I am." - The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
"You don't understand the context!" - A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
"DON'T PANIC" - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
"Keep passing the open windows." - The Hotel New Hampshire (John Irving)
"like a hook into an eye" - You Fit Into Me (Margaret Atwood)
"The horror! The horror!" - Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
"there is a place where the sidewalk ends" - Where the Sidewalk Ends (Shel Silverstein)
"2+2=5" - 1984 (George Orwell)
"It's a dangerous business going out your front door" - The Fellowship of the Ring (J.R.R. Tolkien)
"take down the moon and dismantle the sun" - Funeral Blues (W.H. Auden)
"A gramme is better than a damn." - Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
"Petals on a wet, black bough." - In a Station of the Metro (Ezra Pound)
"So it goes." - Slaughterhouse V (Kurt Vonnegut)
"i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)" - i carry your heart with me (E.E. Cummings)
"Burn, burn, burn." - On The Road (Jack Kerouac)
"Not with a bang but a whimper." - The Hollow Men (T.S. Eliot)
"Let be be finale of seem" - The Emperor of Ice Cream (Wallace Stevens)
"42" - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
"It's history. It's poetry." - The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake." - Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk)