The one and many Marilyn Monroe

Like many people I get lost down the rabbit hole when I start watching youtube. One video leads to another and before I know it my original search for Vivien Leigh means I'm now watching an urban explorer traipse round a deserted plantation mansion in Georgia. However my most recent mini obsession stems from my unwavering love of Marilyn Monroe.

While searching for Marilyn videos I happened across a lady called Sunny Thompson. Now I may be a little late to the party but I was entranced by Sunny's portrayal of Marilyn in her one woman show, Marilyn Forever Blonde, a production which has been running up and down America since 2007.

Sunny has the mannerisms and voice down to a tee as she tells Marilyn's story through the lady's own words. This play looks amazing and I'd love to see it, but unfortunately Sunny has said in interviews that she's been playing Marilyn for 8 years now and Marilyn only played Marilyn for 15, Sunny doesn't think she can do it for that long.

The thing that intrigues me most about Marilyn Forever Blonde is how make up transforms Sunny into a such a convincing version of the icon. The application is so specific! In another interview Sunny mentions the make up design was put together by Marilyn impersonator Jimmy James... Cue a search for his work, and boy is he brilliant!

Jimmy James spent over 10 years impersonating Marilyn and in order to get the look just right he spent 2 years just studying her make up! You have to admit he got it right as the result is mesmerizing.

I watched a lot of his videos and its worth catching his appearance on Geraldo where the host seems to forget Jimmy is actually a boy and gets a bit flirty with 'Marilyn'. Also Jimmy's turn on To Tell The Truth, not only another fantastic impersonation but a fun snapshot of 1980's entertainment.

Jimmy James also appears briefly on a great documentary called Marilyn Monroe - Life After Death which has a refreshing take on the Monroe legend. Filmed in the 80's it interviewed a large group of people who knew and worked with Marilyn, whilst also giving an insight into the impact of her death in 1962.

Alan 'Whitey' Snyder was Monroe's make up artist through most of her career and his interview is the most interesting as he discusses how Marilyn asked him in a jokey way to make her up if she passed away before he did, a promise he honoured when she did die at the early age of 36. The description of how he did this and how the mortuary helped to get her looking right is both fascinating and uncomfortable.

 To round off, Lisa Eldridge is one of my favourite youtube make up artists and her video about Marilyn's iconic make up look is probably to closest we'll get to knowing a least part of the secret tricks and techniques Marilyn used to create the face she showed to the world. Don't be fooled, its not just black eyeliner and red lipstick, in fact the truth is much more interesting and intricate.

Marilyn knew exactly what she was doing when she put on her face. Her make up was a finely tuned kind of magic that helped her to become something bigger and apart from herself. It helped to define her legend and has obviously left an indelible imprint on popular culture that future generations  are still trying to emulate and decipher.

Having a little work done

February was spent retouching an old painting I'd done for my first ever exhibition 12 years ago!

The piece is called 'All Or Nothing At All' which is based on a title of a Frank Sinatra song and it was chosen by the model who posed for me to represent how she felt about herself in that point in her life. 

 Claire with her portrait at the private view of Gentleman Prefer Blondes

After recently commissioning a new painting from me, Claire decided to also buy her old portrait. However I really wasn't happy selling her something I knew I could paint ten times better now than how it had turned out 12 years ago.

I've never gone back and worked on my old paintings before and I have to say the experience was really satisfying and something I'd like to do more of. It's made me realise that work doesn't have a use by date and can be revamped into... anything! However for this particular piece I just wanted to rework the head which for some reason I had originally painted with dark heavy outlines and don't even get me started on the mouth! (why did I paint in weird teeth that shouldn't even be there?)

Before and after

I'm much happier with it now, and it definitely looks more like the polaroid photo I'd used the first time round. Thank goodness I keep everything! I was able to go back and work directly from the photo and blow it up to see the details better.

My main effort was in softening the lines of the face and reshaping the features. I also worked to make the skin tone slightly richer and make her hair a bit more believable. 

I retouched the background too to brighten and tidy it up. I could have continued but this was a retouch not a commission for a new painting, so I had to rein myself in. Still, I'm pretty happy with the result and now I've gotten over the metal boundary which prevented me from looking at old work as a prospect for new work I think this has been a good exercise for me.

Something completely different

I've spent January working on a one off painting that's far from my usual subject matter. This is an intimate snapshot of family life that was commissioned for the man featured in the picture as a surprise birthday present. 

I had in mind the soft colours and cosy feel of a Ladybird book while I was working on this picture and I think it's managed to capture the happy innocence of the moment.

This was somewhat of  a challenge for me because I've never painted anything like this before and it is also quite small, just 40cm square. That's quite a lot of detail to fit in a small space; the polar opposite of my seven foot Princess Leia I painted just before Christmas! 

There is also an interesting addition to this work - The lady who commissioned me, and is mother and wife to the two characters above, also modeled for me for my first ever exhibition 12 years ago! She appeared in a painting called 'All Or Nothing At All' as part of my Gentlemen Prefer Blondes series.

Here's the work as it is now. I think it's interesting that this painting shares a similar colour scheme to the new painting, and she is looking down just like her husband and son are in the new work. The two pieces really complement eachother.

As this work has also been bought alongside the commission I feel the need to do some retouching. You have to remember, I painted this when I was starting out and looking at it now I can see so many things I could paint better!

So this month will be the spent repainting elements of this older work, something I've never done before. I'll let you know how it goes, keep posted...

Rebel Princess - For The Love Of The Force

  

I spent a busy weekend working as one of a group of artists painting live at the For The Love Of The Force Star Wars event in Manchester.

Of course I painted Princess Leia, and I wanted to show her as the provocative, strong, feminist icon she is! I took inspiration from classic pin up styles, the sort of thing you'd find on a B52 bomber and I also added a tattoo to underline her rebel status.

This is possibly the fastest painting I've ever done, especially when you consider that the finished piece is over seven foot tall! Also painting in front of thousands of people as they explored the Star Wars convention was daunting and rewarding all at once. People really do enjoy seeing art being made. Here's how it happened:

And THIS is just a snippet of what was going on all around us while we painted!

I had a fab and exhausting time! My Princess Leia #RebelPrincess is staying up along with the other artworks created over the weekend for a week at Bowlers and will be auctioned off at the end of it. Keep an eye on the Bowlers website and facebook page for more details!

(This is SUCH a difficult pose to do with any kind of refinement as you can see!)

Are naked butlers sexist?

I went to a Christmas fair at Manchester Donkey Sanctuary last week, and a lovely time was had by all. The covered paddock was full of stalls selling lots of handmade goodies, there was cake, there was a raffle and in the midst of about 300 women visitors and three donkeys, there were two slightly shaky naked butlers.

I have to admit I was a bit surpised to be greeted at the door with bucks fizz by one of the said butlers when I had really come to see animals of a much hairer and to be honest, cuter variety, but the two chaps did their best to get into the spirit of the event and by the end of the night were having a great time posing for photos and basically showing off. Their egos had most definately been boosted.

It's not my kind of thing, I find it a bit tacky and unless it's done with much tongue in cheek and humour I'm not really into naked men in public. One of a handful of males who also attended was not impressed with the butlers and commented, 'if that were two women doing that job in a room full of men you'd never hear the end of it, why's this any different?' 

I didn't agree, but his idea really got me wondering why.

I agree that in principal his kind of feminist thinking can work in many situations by highlighting the vast inequalities between the sexes that happen in society (see the brilliant video, If Women Catcalled Men for example), but in this instance it just doesn't work.

The first thing that springs to mind is the lack of threat from a room full of women towards a naked man. OK, of course we've all heard about or witnessed big groups of women getting lairy and over excited at male strip shows but that in itself shows a vast difference straight away. How many men cheer scream and above all laugh when they see a naked woman?

The two naked bulters at the Christmas fair had more threat from the cold than they did from the mostly middle aged ladies who surrounded them. Indeed, most of them were more interested in getting their nails done at one of the stalls than copping a feel. No threat. No intimidation.

I'm not sure this would have been the case had it been two naked women in a room full of men. I'm not putting men down. I'm not inferring men are letches. But it is true that women look at men very differently to the way men look at women. I remember reading in the marvellous, Ways of Seeing by John Berger, which describes our thought processes in making sense of what we see;

“A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. By contrast, a woman's presence . . . defines what can and cannot be done to her.”

Even in our ever progressive society this staement still has a ring of truth. Just apply it next time you watch any TV show or flick through a newspaper. I think what I'm trying to say here is that men and women are still programmed differently and for that reason we will never do things exactly the same or react to similar situations in the same way.

Feminism to me, means equal opportunity with a respect and celebration of our differences. This means taking time to consider our strengths and weaknesses before painting us all with the same black and white ideology. 

There was an informative and fun article in this year's July issue of Glamour Magazine titled; 'What happens when a normal guy does THIS?' The idea being that the average guy journalist Luke Chilton, was challenged to perform with The Dreamboys, Britains answer to The Chippendales. 

He faced all the typical trials; auditions, spray tans, rehearsals and then finally, D-Day, performing in front of 200 women in his fetching Union Jack pants. His words on how it felt sum things up rather perfectly:

'Am I embarrassed? Yes, Did I feel demeand? Not really. For a few minutes I felt like a rock star. But as a man, I'm unencumbered by centuries of gender imbalance. And there's another difference. When a man watches a female stripper, he's mesmerised, slack jawed with (often) sleazy desire. But last night, the girls were screaming with delight. It's bawdy, it's fun [ ] no one gets hurt and everybody has a good time'.

Incidentally, I highly reccommend a visit to the donkey sanctuary and you don't even need to take your clothes off.

Film of The Tattooed Lady

On Friday the talented film maker Hilary Easter Jones came to HOME to film The Tattooed Lady and over the weekend she has created this fantastic short film. I love the way it captures the piece's playful yet melancholy feel. As the film says the exhibition closes next weekend so you have one week left to visit the Lady and get a tattoo while they last!

Tattoo transfers: The Tattooed Lady

Remember those bubblegum sweets you used get as a child, the ones that had the cheap tattoo transfers in the wrapper?

I loved those. The tattoos were always rubbish, fuzzy undefined things but so exciting to wear! They are what partly inspired me to create my own tattoo transfers for The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, an exhibition exploring heartbreak and the dark side of the funfair: 

Dodgy tattooists and partners names impulsively etched into the skin. These were the ideas flitting across my mind as I thought about work for the show, and they seemed to sum up the exhibition's two themes perfectly.

Tattoos are physical scars. Love can leave emotional scars. Sometimes these two things meet and become permanently tangled together.

I collected true stories of love tattoo regret to create new designs for my temporary tattoos. Here are the stories told verbatim and how I translated them into new art works:

The Dead Squid

It's not the first thing you think of when you mention a loved one, but this anonymous story shared through my website was not only funny but ripe with inspiration! It helped me create an image of hopeless finality

'The One that I thought was The One but was not The One and I took a trip to Scarborough. Upon arrival, we immediately decided to get matching tattoos of a > shape on our hands from a dodgy seaside inker. When you put them together it made a ><, which was cute until we realised it made our fingers look like the tentacles of a dead squid. Our relationship is as dead as said squid, and now everyone thinks I've got some weird heart etched on me. Annoyingly, the ex's < is super crisp and nicely done. Always do your research kids... '

The challenge for me here was creating an aesthetically pleasing dead squid, something droopy, slimy and met with an untimely end. There was a lot of tentacle placement, drawing, tracing and re-drawing until I got the look I was going for. I feel quite sorry for this wilted chap.

 

The beaten up fairy

A simple tale that puts images into your head, I decided to show an unusual version of this common motif,

'I started getting tats at the very young age of 16. Stupid. I regret all of them and am in the process of getting them removed. My first was done by my boyfriend of the time. I got a fairy on my lower stomach. Pregnancy, weight gain, and gravity have beaten her up pretty bad over the years. She lasted much longer than the relationship' 

 

The Indian Ink

How many people can relate to this thoughtless teenage act? And how many of them did it for this reason? I wanted to create something that would show the crudeness of the tattoo and the permanence.

 

'Everyone was doing it; crosses, skulls, initials, the whole school was getting it done. It was my mate’s big sister who I had a bit of thing for who said she’d do it for me. Everybody was inking everybody in the mid 80’s. We used to use Indian Ink and a large sewing needle. We’d thread the needle and wrap the cotton around it so it acted as a reservoir for the ink when you pushed it into the skin.

I basically let her do it because she had boobs'

 

The swallow

Probably the saddest tattoo tale I collected, this story was shared anonymously online and I can't help feeling for the young girl who so desperately wanted to please and prove herself to her already tattooed boyfriend. The lewd remarks she now gets because of these tattoos only makes the story more distressing and begs the question; why do people feel the need to pass comment about other people's tattoos, especially to tattooed females?

'I have two American Classic style swallows on my shoulders that I got as soon as I was legally allowed. At the time I went with an ex boyfriend, who was covered in tattoos, and was too nervous to explain the positioning wasn't quite where I wanted them. This was five years ago, and now due to shoddy needle work and my nervousness the lines have spread, leaving them looking sloppy, and because of their positioning they are quite hard to cover. I've since had two more tattoos, and feel these ones were a massive mistake. Similarly I get a lot of "have you got swallows cus you swallow" when I'm out, this makes me feel very uncomfortable'

 

You can bag yourself one of these miniature artworks from The Tattooed Lady vending machine at HOME until 26th July! Join the fun and enjoy the thrill of a tattoo with a story but none of the lasting repercussions!