This week it seemed impossible to make it to issue 66 of Let's Make a Collage - A Contest for All Creatives on Hive(check it), but here I am. I owe a debt to this enthusiastic community, because in the previous edition I could hardly comment and I think there were a lot of remarkably beautiful and interesting works.
Today, moreover, I have the flu. An ordinary flu of the kind that still exists. One of those that don't kill, but you feel like a punching bag with a lot of use.
The photograph provided by @shaka impressed me. From the moment I saw it, I knew I would have trouble tapping it, because I liked it so much just the way it was.
And so it was.
The passage
The beautiful teenage girl in the center of my composition is a portrait by Johannes Vermeer, that of the Lady With The Pearl Earring.
There is innocence in her, but there is also awareness in her gaze. She inhabits the borderline time. It is a difficult time and has its dangers. It is the time of the "passage", in which bioology approaches poetry.
I gave her rosy cheeks, of course.
The sexual metaphor
Water, fish, the moon, roses, these are the elements. There is the cold of the season, but there is also warmth.
The girl inevitably blossoms, her body matures and biology builds its own bridges. It prepares her for reproduction. But she is more than that, she is also a traveling rose and childhood fading with their fables (Nazoa dixit) among the clouds.
Painting some fish and a crown
Much in art is intuitive. This time, I decided to use my own drawings to finish some little details.
I wanted a very bright tadpole fish hovering around the girl, I wanted a bubblegum pink adult fish, and I wanted a crown that the veermer girl could have painted for herself, because yes, and she knows it, she is a princess and always will be.
About the process
I worked with Gimp and systematically used the tools of this program to achieve effects on the color (brightness and contrast, you know, I like strong colors) and on the texture (the reliefs similar to die-cutting were made with Xach-effect) and with the swarp tool, I gave some mobility to the tail of the fish.
Here is the list of links to the images I used:
Young Woman
De Johannes Vermeer - The Met, Johannes Vermeer - Study of a Young Woman, Dominio público, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1656501
Fish
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Egipto,_1882_Mormyrus_Oxyrrhynchus,Polypterus(21409757256).jpg
Roses
https://pxhere.com/es/photo/1186464
https://pixabay.com/es/photos/rose-congelados-invierno-naturaleza-4453865/
https://pxhere.com/es/photo/747646
A poem by Aquiles Nazoa
I would like to say good bye with the poem by Aquiles Nazoa whose verses head my collage. I have copied them by hand, because they are close verses.
Aquiles Nazoa (please don't miss this marvel) wrote a beautiful poem about the end of childhood. It is an elegy, of course, and he dedicates it to himself.
Somehow I knew that was just the right poem to illustrate my work (and not the other way around, hehe).
I will post a free version in English.
Elegy to Aquiles Nazoa
Today is my last day of school;
the school has dawned drizzling;
the teacher sends me to cut some flowers;
I put on my garden gloves.
To go to the burial of my childhood
some ants come crying;
I open, to find out what's this girl's name,
my English calligraphy notebook;
the pretty letters fly out to the flowers.
Meanwhile, crawling in time
the shoes of the leaves wear out,
and in the angelic back of the evening
the clouds fade their fable.
Colors of my childhood so delicate.
I remember that on my chest a little house
I painted with crayons that afternoon;
it had a window through which sometimes my mother peeked out
and a door through which I used to leave to go to school.
It is a great pity that it has been erased:
If I had it, I would cry inside it.
Elegía a Aquiles Nazoa
Hoy es mi último día de colegio;
la escuela ha amanecido lloviznando;
la maestra me manda a cortar unas flores;
yo me pongo los guantes del jardín.
Para ir al entierro de mi niñez
vienen algunas hormigas llorando;
abro, para saber cómo se llama esta muchacha,
mi cuaderno de escritura inglesa;
las bonitas letras salen volando hacia las flores.
Entretanto, arrastrándose en el tiempo
se gastan los zapatos de las hojas,
y en la angélica espalda de la tarde
desvanecen su fábula las nubes.
Colores de mi niñez tan delicados.
Recuerdo que en el pecho una casita
me pinté con creyones aquella tarde;
tenía una ventana por la que algunas veces se asomaba mi madre
y una puerta por la que yo salía para irme a la escuela.
Lástima grande que se me haya borrado:
si la tuviera me metería a llorar dentro de ella.
Tomado de: https://inmediaciones.org/poesie-di-aquiles-nazoa-poemas-de-aquiles-nazoa/