This Paste-Up has been there for quite a while - it has virtually fallen apart. I have photographed it quite a few times over the last few months and there is another one in a small park off Little Eveleigh Street (see below). You can see the Green Bone Head I featured here recently (02 Dec 2010).
Each time I pass it, something has gone missing (i.e. various parts of her body) or there have been various additions via the caring use of coloured textas. She is now careful adorned with earrings and some more than necessary shoes.
I have had a lot fun watching and photographing this poster.
It has made me think about what may have inspired its creator to design this piece. For me, when I first saw it (it was the one in Little Eveleigh Street, which I pass it on the way to the gym), I instantly thought of Icarus of Greek Mythology fame. Icarus attempted to escape Crete using wings, made of feathers and wax, his craftsman father had made for him. Icarus did not heed his father's warnings to not fly too close to the sun or sea, and as a result of the wax melting from flying too close to the Sun, he plummetted to his death into the Icarian Sea.
The Myth has inspired many derivative works in all fields of the Arts, including a Poem by W. H. Auden, titled Musée des Beaux Arts (poem), which is named after the museum in Brussels that houses the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
For some reason the Poem and Painting have made me think a lot about what has happened over the last year and a half. Hard to explain but there is something there, particularly the painting where one can barely make out the legs of Icarus just after his impact with the water.
Life goes on ...
[Thank you to LottieP for technical advice on Icarus, the Poem and Painting. The shoes are for you LottieP.]
Musée des Beaux Arts (poem)
by W. H. Auden (1938).
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone by ThePoetryPost (06 Apr 2010)
I like her shoes - there's a nice economy of style there.
ReplyDeleteI love that line "children who did not specially want it to happen" - the callousness and innocence of youth!