Respect the Red Stare
Item
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Title
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Respect the Red Stare
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Description
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My name is Aidan Kimbrell, I'm a freshman majoring in Sports medicine. I enjoy skating, you'll often see me riding around campus usually wearing an orange beanie. Whenever I'm not in class or skating I'm most likely in my dorm listening to music and trying to find new artists I enjoy listening to. Although I personally do not have a background in the arts, my father has always been very involved himself. He's always either working on new canvas paintings or carving small sculptures out of wood he finds in the Croatan forests back home. I want to dive into the world of art myself, I really enjoy the creative process and the freedoms that come along with creating your own work.
My first step in recreating the art you see above, I needed to get fake blood to paint my face with. I also needed a blank background so that the face can maintain the viewers attention the entire time they look at the photo. In order to properly light my face I took a regular desk lamp and filtered the light through two different disposable face masks both so that the light was less warm and so I didn't go blind trying to take the proper photo looking straight at the light.
The artwork I chose to imitate was Jenny Saville's Red Stare Head IV. This piece was started in 2006, not being finalized until 2011. I chose this piece because I've been fascinated with how raw and real Saville made the face in the painting. It is bruised, beaten, bloodied, with a look of pure anguish on the face. Saville herself describes flesh as "Ugly, beautiful, repulsive, compelling, anxious, neurotic, dead, alive." and I believe that this piece encapsulates all those qualities in spades. The way the blood contrasts against the pallid face is what appealed to me most aesthetically. Having very fair skin myself, I knew that although I could never hope to get the look of despair correct, I could match the contrast of blood to skin. Without revealing too much personal detail, this painting is a depiction of a helpless child from the perspective of an abusive parent/guardian and I can relate to that on a very intimate level.
This project did not take that much creativity as far as all I had to do was apply fake blood and take a photo, but trying to capture the emotion was a very fun and difficult task. It required me to try a lot of different lighting options, frame my face so that is the only focus in the image, and conjure memories to try and match the face presented by Saville.
I think this project was great, and for those who created the incredible masks, I'm sure it was very cathartic for them to make disposable masks, symbols for the chokehold that covid has had on all of us into fun and very lighthearted decorations to adorn themselves with.
This was created as an assignment for Susan Ludeke's ART 1910: Art Appreciation course.
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Creator
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Kimbrell, Aidan
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Coverage
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Greenville, North Carolina
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Date
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2021-10-30
