Illustration I call "The Exquisite Corpuscle, Or Portraits of the Artist as Corpsicle." All the faces and little people are me, so I suppose this is ripe for interpretation and psycho-babble. This is for a project to be published by Wheatland Press and organized by me and Jay Lake; it is a variant on the Surrealist game "The Exquisite Corpse." In that game, itself based on a much older parlor game, participants would each contribute words, which together would make up a sentence that would more or less reflect the personality and consciousness of the whole group. The first such attempt yielded: "Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau" (The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine). In other variants, players contribute a section of a drawing, a sentence of a story, etc.
In our version, we start with one person who does a painting (me), and the painting is given to a writer, who writes a story (in this case, Gary Shockley); Gary's story (but not the painting) is then given to a poet, who writes a poem inspired by the story; the poem then inspires another piece of art which then inspires a play, etc.
The entire line-up of artists and writers is here.
Detail:
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Image (c) 2003 Frank Wu