The Solar System (The Turning Heads) by Thomas Woodruff (.PDF)
File Size: 9.29 MB
The Solar System (The Turning Heads) by Thomas Woodruff
Requirements: .PDF reader, 9.29MB
Overview: Thomas Woodruff is an artist guilty in indulging in visual excesses and entering artistic territory not often traveled by his contemporaries. For this series he has turned his attention to the cosmos and like most of Woodruff’s other projects, this one started with a simple idea: to see if the traditional visual parlor trick of the upside-down head could be taken to new pictorial heights while conveying emotional depth.
The initial impetus began when a close friend of Woodruff was diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s disease. The friend turned to puzzles to try to keep his mind sharpened and Woodruff began to create his own puzzles where a character can turn into another by a simple flip. After perfecting the tricky two-sided image strategy, Woodruff decided to structure a project depicting the planets, using Gustav Holst’s 1916 orchestral work, The Planets Suite, as inspiration. The planets have been impeccably rendered on black silk velvet and are motorized to turn. These choices are deliberate gestures to challenge our oft-puritanical levels of taste. Part Art Nouveau, part van art, the paintings are heraldic, totemic and mandalic. The characters are dressed to kill with ruffs and ribbons, feathers and flames, blossoms and beads. The two-faced nature of the character’s situations challenges our visual and emotional perceptions in new ways, while still utilizing a visual vocabulary of optical tricks explored by many artists of all cultures and ages; from the prints of Kuniyoshi and the Joge-e masters of Japan, to witty drawings of Rex Whistler, from the paintings of Arcimboldo to the comics of Gustave Verbeek.
Genre: Non-Fiction > General
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