I’d Like a Bread Sandwich, Please.
Clearly, I have tuned out the high-tech, fast-paced world of cyberspace much longer than a week. Suppose once I got over the withdrawl symptoms, the sting of falling out of contact faded into a distant memory. I’d love to say that I’ve been off skipping through grassy meadows and hanging out with unicorns over the course of this past month, but I’d be lying. In reality, I’ve been crunching numbers, printing wholesale orders, and generally sorting out how to grow my business, recover from an insane f***ing tax payment, and save for some ever-joyous dental work. Honestly, is solid food really that important to me? I’d be perfectly happy just gnawing on bread.
Which brings me to my next thought. Whenever I go through an ‘un-fun,’ number-crunching, strategic phase of business development, I insist that it be immediately followed by a period of creative saturation. Reading, perusing my favorite design & art sites, sketching new illustrations for shirts. These periods are the bread that must surround what I can only refer to as a crap sandwich. You’ll eat several of these while building a small business. Luckily, it’s really just the middle that sucks. And with this latest dose of mind-numbing filling now out of the way, I’m ripe to gnaw another delicious slice of craftiness.
So, I sat down last week to sketch out my next shirt, and, strangely, it has brought me back around to an old, old love of mine. Salome. A shadowy, often misunderstood figure from the bible, I first learned of her through Oscar Wilde’s play by the same name. Sinister, predatory and perhaps the one of the earliest incarnations of the femme fatale, she’s completely intriguing. Upon finishing the play, I read any and all academic articles I could find on her, studied the countless paintings that she inspired, and listened to Strauss’s famous operatic telling of her mysterious dance of the seven veils.
This past week, I happened across one of those paintings–my favorite rendering of her in any medium, actually. It is the below painting by Armenian artist Vardges Surenyants. Beautiful and decadent, I decided to draw from that piece by deconstructing it, shattering the background and creating the illusion that she is a silhouette rising up from the center of the illustration. The new shirt will debut both on my Etsy shop next month, but I have inserted a sneak preview below the painting…
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