Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

Imperfection is often fascinating visually/artistically. In freshman Greek I had a lot of free time. I'd had a couple of years of Greek already and it was a first year class. I worked further and further ahead, memorizing vocabulary, declensions, conjugations, principle parts. I was bored spitless. There was a guy in there with these Popeye arms. He was a rower. His forearms were super muscular with these huge ropey veins, but his biceps were just average. I drew his arms over and over in a variety poses. Sometimes I drew the rest of him too, but mostly I drew his arms, the strange bulges and curves. It wasn't even vaguely a sexual thing. He was a nice guy, but utterly alien in temperament from me. I can't tell you if he was good looking or not, though his appearance is burned in my memory from having drawn him so often. To me he was really a series of problems in shadow, in line, in proportion. There was just something about those arms that drew the eye, that needed drawing.

Why am I mentioning it? Partially because of something crotalus_atrox wrote about Eames of Inception, and partially because this informs the reaction my character Gwen has to her pirate lover/husband/whatever Scarpia over on Denver. To my way of thinking, she no longer sees him in all his obscene ugliness, but has through drawing him so often come to think of his face and body as a series of lines, proportions, shadows. in a real sense, the process of her moving from fear into love is a similar one, a breaking down of all the aspects of who he is into digestible fragments she learned to live with and love, because looking at him all at once... yeah. To my way of thinking, my Gwen doesn't see her Scarpia all at once, ever, even when she's looking right at him. This is divergent than being blind to his faults. She is completely aware of some pretty horrible stuff, she just never looks at the big picture any more, a pointillist eye view of her lover.