Been a little absent of late.
Hopefully be able to be a touch more active for a while now.
Feel free to re-edit in any way shape or form that takes your fancy...
A little back story might help you out here.
Beatrice has very strong links to these balls/globes/spheres. Beatrice is a performer, a juggler and dancer to be more precise, these balls are her prop of choice.
This might be why, with no other information to go on, the balls and staging might appear out of kilter. (They may still be wrong, I'd like to hear your further thoughts .)
To think they could have just as easily been a juggling pin (i.e. prop of choice) renders things to seem a bit more random than intentional. My thought to that is that her chosen prop was one of significance to her and as such still carries weight ... but the viewer wouldn't know that ... unless of course, SHE (or those that know her) is the viewing audience.
As a portrait, per se, her understanding of "what's the point" is already known. As "art" to the public, it is not and then must be established (or left intentionally ambiguous) ... i.e. sometimes we have to help the viewer more than we might otherwise think. I doubt that I could have ever associated her spheres with juggling (even as former juggler), etc. ... and as such would have never gotten to it being a personally reflective portrait. Rather, I saw it as an interpretive statement. Had there been additional/different clues @ performing, then it likely would have been seen as the former.
Obviously, I read something into it after I rebalanced the spheres to a diminuitive element. In doing so, I gave the viewer (myself) little choice but to see her as the subject and the spheres as contributory.
Don't, your thoughts were valid, and definitely made me think.
I think you summed it up nicely when you said "Sometimes you have to help the viewer a bit more than you would otherwise think."
Cheers Aunti, I do like the warm version, a lot, as it goes.
...but...
there's a hard distance to the blue that reflects a more clinical turn of thought.
More importantly though, I'm really fed up of the ubiquitous 'urine filter' that has been pervading my work for too long.
It's typical, the moment I rebel, along comes the perfect image for those golden tones...
on #2 I'll sort out those grim colour patches before I send them over to her
