Contre/philia Project
Drawings that are meditations on the roles of animals in pop culture/history/natural history/literature/fables/mythology, with each drawing focusing on one animal and exploring its universe in the context of the above things.
Each drawing is 24”x 18”, Marker, colored pencil and pastel pencil on paper.
The idea of the ‘Blazon**’ and the ‘Contre-Blazon’ in poetry is of interest to me. The title of the body of work plays off of the Blazon, the Contre-Blazon, and Biophilia*: Contre/philia
*Biophilia is the term coined by the Harvard naturalist Dr. Edward O. Wilson to describe what he saw as humanity's "innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes," and to be drawn toward nature, to feel an affinity for it, a love, a craving.
**A literary blazon (or blason) catalogues the physical attributes of a subject, usually female. The device was made popular by Petrarch and used extensively by Elizabethan poets. Spenser’s “Epithalamion” includes examples of blazon: “Her goodly eyes like sapphires shining bright, / Her forehead ivory white …” Blazon compares parts of the female body to jewels, celestial bodies, natural phenomenon, and other beautiful or rare objects. See for example Thomas Campion’s “There Is a Garden in Her Face.” Contreblazon inverts the convention, describing “wrong” parts of the female body or negating them completely as in Shakespeare’s famous sonnet “My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun.”
