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felixxkatt — Gloria's Dilemma
Published: 2004-09-16 05:13:25 +0000 UTC; Views: 2441; Favourites: 66; Downloads: 257
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Description
Gloria was a beautiful, intelligent, well-traveled woman until her 60's when a severe lung infection confined her to her home and an oxygen tank. I was fortunate enough to rent an apartment from her and her husband for a year on beautiful cayuga lake, near Ithaca. i made this piece while i lived there, cocooned in a surreal, ancient house with a fragile, tragic, and beautiful elderly couple living downstairs. i was searching for an image that would speak to aged beauty and tragedy. a useless but still striking wing that i found on the sidewalk seemed to sum somthing up for me ....original work is small, 7x9 inches. oil paint on plywood, 2002.
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Comments: 46
Its beautiful.............* I cry a little on the inside with empathy for the image.
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wow I amazong deep blue 
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This is really beautiful. How you paint glass is very inspiring.
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This is so soft and magical, a beautiful painting and tribute to life. I love the tones and contrasts in this beautiful work of art.
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This is simply beautiful. The story behind it really adds something. Its not often that I get to see pictures with real stories behind them.
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This is so soft and magical, a beautiful painting and tribute to life. I love the tones and contrasts, beautiful work.
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thank you for your thoughtful comment!
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I think its beautiful! and I feel you have captured that essence you wanted to capture very well. Its the fragility of the butterfly encased in this beautiful old bottle. The combination is truly breath taking.
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Beautiful tonality, it conveys the mood you wanted perfectly and on a technical level, the way you handled the glass is just remarkable.
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The whole concept is incredibly sad, but it's wonderfully put together. My only real critique is that it doesn't appear to me to be sitting on anything. It's almost as if it's floating next to a blue curtain.
BUT, that said, I am most curious if you gave it to them or if they ever saw it? That's one thing you didn't mention in your original comments.
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no they never saw it. it was more of an aside comment than a thing i wanted to share with them. i haven't heard from them in some time, and i am not sure Gloria is still alive. it's hard to ask a thing like that. "your chronically ill wife... is she still with us?"
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That's beautiful, and unspeakably sad. Better than words.
The painting wouldn't have had quite the same meaning without your description, but it would still be a very similar meaning.
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thanks. it's more personal with the story. but i think no less sad and poignant without it.
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i don't think i have the technical skills to critique this much (err...at all), it was just too beautiful to pass by without saying something. i just well, like the whole feel of it, sort of a sad poem type of feel.
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thank you!
the rest of the poem in your signature goes "eight for heaven, nine for hell, and ten for the devil's own self..."
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ooh. i like that version better than the ones i've heard before!
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it's one of the southern amaerican versions i believe. though in america they count crows. in ireland and england it's magpies.
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mmm. i like magpies better! though i used to count crows at school sometimes. as good a way of diving exam grades as any
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thanks for the input. the fabric bothered me, too, but it actually looked like that, it was a pseudo-satin stuff that reflected the light oddly, and i painted every strange little color it had. i deliberately made the lid of the thing less starkly white and eye-catching than the actual because i knew it would make the piece top-heavy, taking any more out of it would make it look like it was makde of soap-bubbles. there is no cropping at this point, it's framed and hanging. i am actually pretty pleased with it's just-off-of-center composition, and i am well-aware of the age-old rules of composition that loudly declare centrally placed objects a faux-pas. aside from that, at this point this piece has been done for a year and a half, and i'm not inclined to go back to change any part of it. i am interested more in the feeling/idea aspect than the technical "you-could-add-a-brush-stroke-here" kind of crit. this one's pretty straightforward for my work, simple in fact. and it's frikken tiny, with only one element involved. wait till i get the complicated stuff. up. or tell me what you think of the other ones!
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ok it IS pretty though hehe.. the use of a subtle opposite colour within a blueish piece reminds me of picasso's blue period.. the white shine on the bottle is great at bringing the bottle forward, but i think it may need a more solid base, its unclear as to whether the blue background is a real object, such as a cloth draped over a bench etc. as it seems with the dark bluish horizontal line near the bottom of the bottle, or it could also be a blueish background design which has no relation to the glass.. i think you should make it clear to the viewer which it is.
its quite an interesting picture with two focal points - i think the lid of the bottle creates just as much attention as does the wing, which means your eye goes back and forth between them.
however i think that the bottle should sit further to the right in the picture, since the right side of it slants inward, this would balance the picture more, so maybe you should crop a chunk of the background on the right off, maybe also some of the top, so the wing was closer to the middle.. actually now that i think of it since the wing points down to the left the whole bottle may be better nearer to the upper right corner but im just rambling now
its really well done
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i kind of think that the subject being a broken, detatched wing kind of negates any expectation beyond being used in a witch's pot. hard to reattatch those things, you know?
i wanted to throw in the descriptive process for sake of interest, however when i present the work it only has a title tag. i don't like putting verbose attatchments beside gallery-work, if it can't stand alone it doesn't stand, in my mind. so if you didn't have the little story attatchment what would you think?
(thanks for serious crit. "it's pretty" and "i like it" are nice but always kind of make me crazy... i think it comes after graduating art school)
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I can see what you were trying to do here pretty clearly - but I don't think the painting's really worked atmospherically. The blue background gives it an air of expectation, like it is about to be released (which I assume from your description wasn't your intention). Also I think it needs a better sense of light; putting more general shadows in the background would probably do that. The off-centre composition looks unbalanced to me, more shadowing would help that as well.
Of course, all that said, I think it's very well painted, and the colour is subtle.
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the colors are amazing, and the bottle looks almost real, my respects to you.
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