Marie WheelerI missed my deadline, again! Kicker is that I completed my Marlene Dumas inspired work last weekend and never wrote about it. Bad blogger.
Marlene Dumas
So this weeks inspiration from Love Art, Happy Life was Marlene Dumas. She was born in South Africa, but emigrated to the Netherlands and continues to produce her work in that area. Seems pretty smart to me, one is so much safer than the other!
Her work is very distinctive as it immediately instills a sense of unease and evokes a grotesqueness of nearly any subject. I have a lot of photos of friends and family and couldn’t consider using any of them as it felt so wrong, like I would be hurting them or making them dirty if I used their likeness. It was weird. It is weird.
Since I couldn’t bear to use someone I love as inspiration for this particular style, I decided that I would look for 
inspiration from Victorian post-mortem photography. It was the sweet, yet creepy practice of posing your loved one for a family portrait after they were deceased.
*shakes* bleh.
As I was perusing the interwebs for my equally creepy inspiration portrait, I found it in Presumed Curable: An Illustrated Casebook of Victorian Psychiatric Patients in Bethlem Hospital and used the middle photo. There is something about her.
Dumas-Inspired Art
In the spirit of giving Dumas the maximum-inspiration potential, I also purchased a pen and ink set from the local Big Box Craft Store, who I am presently really upset with as it seems they keep ripping me off with their 40% off coupons that are still higher than Amazon pricing, but whatever. I decided on the Speedball Complete Calligraphy Kit as it the pen, ink and nibs could be used for art as much as it could be used for calligraphy. I do want to get better at hand-lettering too.
And then I got to work.
First, I roughly sketched out the facial details in charcoal pencil and smudged with my finger to create some shading and depth. I then used the pen and ink to put in some of the rough lines and used my waterbrush to take off some of the harshness of some of the lines.
I then added in some watercolor, pulled back some areas with white gesso, and repeated this process a few times.
I decided to stop as the paper was going to give out if I continued to work the details.
The end product has much of the feeling of Dumas, but doesn’t quite evoke the same.
I feel like I would like to continue in this style, but also struggle with that idea as it is quite dark overall and doesn’t fill me with a sense of beauty and joy that I get from a lot of other styles that I work with.
