So I’ve been playing with stencils lately – mostly of film images and icons. Putting images together, and playing with the shapes that shadows and light makes. It’s pretty weird when I start thinking about how much the brain makes up itself when given a few clues; blobs in certain places, and in certain shapes on a page (or a screen) are interpreted by the brain as faces.
It reminds me of something that Scott McCloud writes about, about comics; how little we actually need to make a face, like those yellow smiley faces – two well placed dots and a curve in a circle = face.
So, stencils are interesting in and of themselves, and I’m thinking about them in comparison to my comics – images of human form reduced to more simple representations, still getting across a lot of information.
These images below, are a series that I’ve been thinking about for a while. Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in the shower scene in Psycho and Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) in Taxi Driver (ohhh, my film geek is showing). I was thinking about how often women are victims and men are perpetrators of violence – and these two images popped into my head. But I reckon they’re most interesting because they’re kind of complicated, within the context of the films themselves, and the careers of the films’ directors (Alfred Hitchcock and Martin Scorcese ,respectively).
Oh dear, I could probably type an essay about this stuff. I think I’ve been spending too much time by myself. But the images look cool:
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