Blue nudes
BLUE NUDES
or play with my body, in blue, and play with Adriano, in purple and yellow
Prompted by Matisse’s Blue nude collage, I have to say I did not have to think too hard to create this month.
Blue, nude, it seems one of those subjects that keep popping up in XXth C. art. From Picasso’s soft and almost sad painting, to Yves Klein’s anthropométries, I was seeing blue nudes all around.
I considered the obvious, for an analog photographer prompted a blue piece of art: a cyanotype, and I still have this idea in the back of my head (like countless other ideas).
I first played around with blue, and some level of abstraction, by playing with distortion. OK, I’ll admit I mostly made these self-portraits to finish my second roll of 35mm film from Montréal, but creativity is creativity, and these portraits look lovely in my opinion, it’s all there, it’s clearly me, but with a distinctly painterly quality.
This being a post about creativity, and for the sake of explaining my process, I coated a frame glass with lard (there’s no vaseline in my house, so I found a transparent substance that could be smudged easily), I placed it between the camera and myself, I focussed on myself (best I could given there was a layer of blur obstructing the view from my camera), and took the portraits.
As much as I like the results, this wasn’t it yet.
It’s when I opened this month’s Vogue and found an anthropométrie by Yves Klein on a full page in the middle of the magazine, that I decided what to do – I would link to vogue in normal circumstances, but I wrote these lines in one of the many airplanes that got me to my family in Italy, and I’m posting this from the village café in Valle d’Aosta at 2000m altitude with patchy internet, I’m sort of checked out and lacking a few resources, so I’m cutting myself some slack 😉
The painting looked layered, like there was a blue painting on a transparent surface and a body blurred behind in the background. Or maybe it was a photo of the painting that included blurred skin colours, I don’t quite remember, I didn’t dwell on it, I just decided.
So one Friday when Adriano was home – in what became a bit of a routine with him this past year, because it’s fun, because I can’t work concentrated when there’s a child at home, because sometimes he asks for it, and because Adriano and I made some awesome work this year this way – I started setting up my backdrop, a piece of glass, my water-based oil paints, and my camera, sure enough, he got droning around and started showing he wanted in.
So I took a few test images with a small sheet of glass, on digital, and he came in and out of my frame as I was taking the images.
But then, when I’d felt the limitations of my setup and cleaned the glass up, going for a much bigger sheet of glass, I turned to him, and asked him if he wanted to make some with his own painting, and his own colours.
He chose purple and yellow, and to keep the colours separate and clean, I had him paint each color on different sides of the glass sheet (purple on the side of the subject, yellow on the side of the camera)
And the results are magical:
Finally, I cleaned his painting and – to finish my roll of film, again – made another blue silhouette on the bigger sheet of glass and I asked him to be the shutter person, and they came so lovely that at this point, though they’re kind of similar, they’re also very different and I’m really not sure which series is my favorite.
