papercut in half-hour increments

[corvi]

I take a ferry to work, which has been good for me. It's easy for important-to-the-soul things like longform reading, or creative hobbies to get completely pushed out of my life by work and chores and tiny but urgent nonsense. But an hour each weekday spent on a boat is time I can't actually wash dishes or do taxes with. Oh no, how dreadful, I guess I'll listen to the waves and keep an eye out for goofy seals and read or write or do art or something else wonderful. Woe.

I took a progress photo of this piece at the end of each ferry trip, so each photo represents half an hour of work, or less if I finished a section but didn't feel there was enough time start start the next step, or hadn't brought the next sheet of paper. The finished piece is four layers of paper, each with holes cut to show the next layer down: black over white over red over gold. It took almost a week of ferry trips to go from the sketch to the final piece, plus about two hours of fussing with frames and mattes, which I didn't do on the ferry.

(Warning: It is a picture of a Christian saint made for a church event, so perhaps don't look if you're uninterested in that sort of thing.)
















According to The Golden Legend, a collection of saint stories written sometime around 1260, this saint (Mary Magdalene) once spent three years living in a cave that men were prevented by an unseen force from entering, and during that period lived by consuming music instead of food. Regrettably, The Golden Legend does not say where the cave is; I know several people who would love to vacation there. :)

I love how weird the saint stories in The Golden Legend are. Saints should definitely be people who live in man-free caves and eat music and less, I dunno, being suffering and perfect and graciously sad about how everyone else isn't perfect enough. The universe and the people who live here are wondrous and strange; if we are to have holyfolk to walk with us, they need be as strange and wondrous as we are. The modern Christian church gets saints all wrong. But that's another rant entirely. 
 

Comments

[shadesofmauve]

Oh, how lovely to have that as your commute, and thus sacred (in the personal sense, the saint just being a little extra, um, sacridity) time.

Whether or not one is interested in Christianity, old hagiography has some very interesting characters and stories in it. And I love art pics, but most especially art-in-progress pics, because there's something special about seeing someone else's process. The work you do is so quintessentially backwards -- cutting out what you want to color in -- that even when I can see how you get there, it's still pretty magical.

Is this the first four-color one you've dione, or just the first you've shown here?

[yam]

Oh, that's beautiful! What is the thing that is not an egg that she is holding? Also I love that she has robot hands until the last picture.

[tylik]

I love that story! It's reminding me a bit of some of the stories around Guanyin. (Stories around Guanyin are amazingly diverse, starting with the whole gender ambivalence thing. But subsisting only on music for a period seems right up their alley.)

(Does China Galland know this story? She would love this story...)

[kellan_the_tabby]

*delight*

[ivy]

I realize that I never commented on this at the time, but I really enjoyed seeing the process through, and I agree with you about the weirdness being an important part of it, heh. The red color you used is thoroughly appropriate and visually striking!