Musings on Fashionable Bison

Ballpoint pen in sketchbook

Oct. 2010

 

Pilot rolling ball pen in sketchbook

Nov. 2010

Ballpoint pen in sketchbook

Nov. 2010

It's a long story, but there are some people in my life who shall go unnamed who call me Baby Bison. It's not because of size or hairiness or anything...the nickname came about because I tend to knock things, including people, over so often I am akin to a newborn bison struggling through the world on unsteady legs... While this is a term of endearment I find very endearing, I thought, why not illustrate this bison idea? What would I wear as a bison, myself? Perhaps a nice Elizabethan ruff or corset? Some corsets from a couple hundred years later? Why not. The bison you find in these drawings has evolved from a self-portrait to a character at the very beginning of her story, and I think we'll hopefully hear some more from her in the future...

Victorian Ladies from Harper's Bazaar, 1867-1898

Pilot rolling ball pen in sketchbook

Nov. 2010

Alex Rheault, of Quimby Colony fame, lent me this wonderful book to look through, copy drawings, find inspiration from: Victorian Fashions & Costumes from Harper's Bazaar: 1867-1898. I've been flipping through it kind of obsessively, drooling over the extravagance of bustles and the shapes of the women's corseted bodies, and also trying to figure out my own rendering style through copying the delicate lines of the fashion plates. This exercise has been extraordinarily helpful in my costume design practice, to pinpoint silhouettes and learn more about how the Victorians adorned their bodies. From an illustration standpoint, it  has gotten me to learn how to simplify and think about the rendering of different fabrics.

First Few Quimby Drawings

Ballpoint pen on butcher paper scraps

Sept. 2010

These drawings were done this past September during my residency at the Quimby Colony in Portland. I did them to work through some ideas for performance pieces during my stay at Quimby, and also as an opportunity to explore ballpoint pen a little more. The hair/mouth lady is inspired by Lavinia from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus--her tongue and hands get cut off during the play (perverse Elizabethan penchant for gorey entertainment...), and I thought an interesting illustration of those wounds and the lasting devastation they cause would be having hair grow out of the wounds. While hair is often a symbol of femininity (refer to the Victorian fixation with it), here it also represents time and the continued visceral nature of Lavinia's wounds--hair takes an insanely long time to grow, and here it appears it has been growing from her mouth and stump wounds for years.