Rainer Maria Rilke, Archaic Torso of Apollo (1908). A week of feeling exposed - as the speaker in the poem - humbled by the exposing light of art so honest and pure. Naturally, I take something so divine as that poem, and pervert it, inadvertently, through my own scribblings (a wee less honest than the Archaic).
I had read that Rilke was born in Prague, something that had never before sunk in. An ancestral kin (I am one quarter Czech, myself), the poem now taking on an appeal on a more personal level.
I had imagined a storyline following from a Prague train ticket being used as a bookmark on that poem to the reader (in this case, Rilke himself) looking up and seeing a train poster declaring 'there is no place that does not see you', and the brighter city out the window (that's early 20th century Prague in that fourth frame) accompanied by the declarative "you must change your life".
The concept in the fourth frame was to make the riders blurred in the foreground, thereby focusing on the city outside. Of course, I missed the line of coloring in a way that seemed to give the train rider a bulbous forehead, or a bug eye.
This was inadvertent, but oddly met the theme of the ant poison ad in the third frame. This is from an actual ad (from the 50's?), only the replaced/inserted text "there is no place that does not see you" is used threateningly.
Google translate gave me the phrase 'Ameisen Arbeiten' which is a literal translation of Ants Work, or something like that, which echoes in my head a song by Fiva MC that asks, in German, "Are you a man or a mule?" The implication being that the reader on the train is a bug, and the Apollo beauty-light exposes him with truth in the same way that a pesticide eliminates an ant.
Of course, the process described in Rilke's poem is not dehumanization, but transformation, and so my subversion amounts to juvenile misrepresentation. This is embarrassing. But it also...works? Because the feeling of being hit with 'you must change your life' is not liberating. It's humiliating.
That story in the comic not explicit enough to be easily followed, and the third frame needs a lot of reworking before it stops looking like a dog's breakfast. But, no matter. I think the comic stands fairly well on it's own. (Though no one will ever be blinded by it.)
Rainer Maria Rilke, Archaic Torso of Apollo (1908). A week of feeling exposed - as the speaker in the poem - humbled by the exposing light of art so honest and pure. Naturally, I take something so divine as that poem, and pervert it, inadvertently, through my own scribblings (a wee less honest than the Archaic).
ReplyDeleteI had read that Rilke was born in Prague, something that had never before sunk in. An ancestral kin (I am one quarter Czech, myself), the poem now taking on an appeal on a more personal level.
I had imagined a storyline following from a Prague train ticket being used as a bookmark on that poem to the reader (in this case, Rilke himself) looking up and seeing a train poster declaring 'there is no place that does not see you', and the brighter city out the window (that's early 20th century Prague in that fourth frame) accompanied by the declarative "you must change your life".
The concept in the fourth frame was to make the riders blurred in the foreground, thereby focusing on the city outside. Of course, I missed the line of coloring in a way that seemed to give the train rider a bulbous forehead, or a bug eye.
This was inadvertent, but oddly met the theme of the ant poison ad in the third frame. This is from an actual ad (from the 50's?), only the replaced/inserted text "there is no place that does not see you" is used threateningly.
Google translate gave me the phrase 'Ameisen Arbeiten' which is a literal translation of Ants Work, or something like that, which echoes in my head a song by Fiva MC that asks, in German, "Are you a man or a mule?" The implication being that the reader on the train is a bug, and the Apollo beauty-light exposes him with truth in the same way that a pesticide eliminates an ant.
Of course, the process described in Rilke's poem is not dehumanization, but transformation, and so my subversion amounts to juvenile misrepresentation. This is embarrassing. But it also...works? Because the feeling of being hit with 'you must change your life' is not liberating. It's humiliating.
That story in the comic not explicit enough to be easily followed, and the third frame needs a lot of reworking before it stops looking like a dog's breakfast. But, no matter. I think the comic stands fairly well on it's own. (Though no one will ever be blinded by it.)