Friday, August 11, 2006

Illustration Friday: Capture




My submission is a little late due to the fact that I haven't had internet access for the past week.

I was reading some Nabokov. In particular, Lolita. I thought that this theme went very well what was being mentally digested at the time. When I first approached the project, I thought of doing something very literal. Perhaps a little girl trapped behind prison-bars of human flesh? But the more I thought about the writing and my inspiration for the theme, it became clear to me that to do so, would weaken it. To steal a line from Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nabokov is a very "painterly writer." He often times uses leaden symbolic imagery to convey his point.

Here is a quote from Lolita: "Let me retain for a moment that scene in all its trivial and fateful detail: hag Holmes writing out a receipt, scratching her head, pulling a drawer out of her desk, pouring change into my impatient palm, then neatly spreading a banknote over it with a bright '...and five!'; photographs of girl-children; some gaudy moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to the wall ('nature study')...."

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