Assignment 5 - Pt 2

 

The idea behind this pair of drawings was personification. At the time of creation, I had recently read the play Rossum's Universal Robots, which plays a lot with the ideas of what it means to be sentient and imbuing humanity into things. That is why I decided to make a scarecrow, which is seen as an imperfect facsimile of a human, but is nonetheless very human in its creation: a silly smile with that silly hat on a stick body. It reeks of humanity. Conversely, the robot had its face taken directly from a neutral mask, and its body is composed of more complicated textures, and though it is divided into a more human shape with its segments forming something closer to a human body, it reads to me as colder and more imposing. 

 

I was asked why I used paper towel in my project in tandem with paper, and while I have given some thought to it, the truth remains that it is because that was what worked best. I needed something that would adhere to crevasses and uneven or rounded surfaces better than paper, which can be very stiff. I also needed something that was available in abundance, and I was not able to access the fabric scraps from the costume department, and even if I had, they likely would not have worked well with charcoal, given their varying colour. I suppose I could have taken a bus to a local fabric store and purchased the correct colour of fabric, but at that point, it would have been more distracting, pricey, time-consuming, and all-around inconvenient, for no benefit other than avoiding the preconceived notions of others toward my choice in material. In short, I used paper towel for practical reasons, and somewhat resent the notion that it should have to have an artistic justification beyond that.

 

Paper and Paper towel (various sizes), charcoal, 4 hours.