Saturday, December 10, 2011

Hey

    Much of my work that I post here are those with organic subjects, but sometimes I do branch out beyond the dried twig. This time I chose to work with a bit of technology, challenging myself to create an image that is not only conceptual but also demonstrates that we can see things anew if we just look at them differently.
 
    In case you don't recognize the object, it is a mobile phone. The text was created with a couple of additional layers, capturing actual vernacular from texts I have received from my teen son. To render them, I used the pre-WWII Royal typewriter inherited from my parents, and which I used extensively while a teen myself to write poetry and letters, way before we even imagined anything like a computer, Photoshop, or layers, not to mention cell phones.
 
     More layers were added, thanks to images lifted from my grandfather's 1918 copy of Anatomy of A Human Body by Henry Gray, F.R.S. (Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons). The tome is commonly known as Gray's Anatomy and this 20th edition was "Thoroughly Revised and Re-edited" by Warren H Lewis, B.S., M.D. The book, some 2.75" thick and which is fraying a bit around the edges, cost my grandfather $9. He used it at dental school in Berkeley, California, almost a century ago, after which we built a successful  practice in Bakersfield. I daresay he would not have approved of teen use of cellphones, nor of my choice of one of Gray's illustrations, the innocent prostate gland, positioned just under the illustration of the brain. Well, just think conceptually.



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