Deborah Parkin

This Month’s Featured Artist: Shawhouse

Hi Everyone,

Recently I asked Shawhouse if he would write a journal about his inspiration behind his work and here it is – hope you enjoy – please check out his wonderful work.

Debxx

Profile

I do mostly portrait work, for two reasons – #1. Rembrandt, Vermeer and black paint. Those two guys had talent, no kidding. And I’ll bet each was pretty damned stoked that someone had the foresight to invent black paint. I’m a fan. Reason #2. That split second of connection when the viewer of a portrait knows that there’s something percolating just under the surface, a story right behind the subject’s eyes. I try to do work that draws the viewers in (by implying a story) and seduces them into filling in the rest. That’s why so much black & white and shadow in most of my images – I’m hoping the viewer’s imagination will take over. The less the picture gives up, the better.

I read somewhere that our brains are built to rely on symbols and memory triggers to process & categorize the daily torrent of visual stimulation that descends on us from all quarters. Makes sense. I don’t think we actually completely “see” things after we’ve taken them in and cataloged them the first time. More likely, we cherry pick enough symbols to say to ourselves, “red, big, moving, lights – Firetruck! Next!” or “gray, bearded, yap, yap, yap – Shawhouse!” If you let them, people become co-creators of whatever story your image is telling them, filtering everything through their personal tastes, prejudices, desires, etc. It becomes interactive, a conversation. Suddenly they have a stake in the outcome. I rest my case.

On the other hand….

I prefer black & white, but am sometimes willing to put on a pair of shades and hunker down when the image grabs me by the lapels and says, “Listen, Ace, snap out of it. I’m a tight pink dress from the early sixties. My entire decade was in color. The forties, black & white. The fifties, brown. The sixties? Hell, even the Zapruder film was color.” “All right, already,” I respond with peevish dignity, “I’ll make an exception, bright colors it is. But the ghost of Vermeer’s going to be pissed!”

Creating a new image is always an adventure. I try to emphasize an emotion, nothing more specific than that. It’s gratifying when the picture gets comments from viewers about what they believe is going on, different stories, all over the map, but all containing the intended emotion at it’s core. That is, when it works…

Marin, the model for “to be alone,” is a professional actress blessed with the grace, presence and strong feminine features of leading ladies of early Hollywood through the forties. Marin could have held her own opposite Bogart, Spencer Tracy, et al. When I approached her with the idea of recreating images of Greta Garbo, she told me that I wasn’t the first to notice the resemblance and that she had been toying with the idea of a one-woman show about Garbo. Lumbering in as only the uninitiated can, we started out by trying to copy one of the most famous of Hollywood portraits. Garbo was dressed in shapeless black, her hair pulled back, elbows on knees, head framed by her hands like Munch’s THE SCREAM. She glared severely down at the camera in front of a Studio Harcourt-type background. The portrait encapsulated the essence of Garbo’s public image – beauty, glamour, intensity, alienation, inscrutability, a woman who clearly vahnts to be alone. Our shoot was pretty straight forward – Marin, in black sweater and tights, pinned back her hair and assumed the position, so to speak, in front of a white backdrop. I lit her with two 24” fluorescent softboxes and a camera-mounted speedlight. We used the original photo for reference, but soon discovered that we weren’t going to get a perfect match. We changed the angle so that it looked like a different shot from the same session. I added the background in post, threw in a shadow that hovered behind her like a dark presence and a vignette to emphasize her isolation, monkeyed around with the skin tones and, luckily, backed off before overdoing.