CornellArt

“It must be remark’d of fine clothes how they move.” - Charles Perrault Belle: Madame de Garderobe would love these remarks about the effects of fine clothing.

Sure, someone might be more technically accomplished than you - you might not be able to colour as nicely or craft a sentence that rings as poetically - but art is only really secondarily about that. It’s firstmost about what you, uniquely, have to express, and how the precise way you express it might be what others need to relate to it - even if it’s less flashy, less “beautiful”, and gets fewer notes.

I promise you this: there are obscure fanfics with only a handful of notes that are the read-and-re-read favourites of someone too anxious to comment. There are drawings done by 14-year-olds in poorly-blended markers that are someone’s favourite because they spoke to something that nothing else did. There are covers of songs where your voice cracks and you cringe every time you hear it but someone thinks the way it cracked just at that moment added beauty to the song. There are angsty three-line poems you wrote at 4am that someone once called “pretentious emo trash” that are loved by someone else going through the same thing as you.

And I guarantee you, there is something unique about your art. Even if you’re “saying something someone else has said”. Even if you’re the thousandth person to take on the subject. Even if you feel like you’re not at all unique. You’re bound to express something, however subtle, that didn’t exist until then.

Jerry Huynh’s animated short “Jing Hua” or “Flower in the Mirror” follows a woman practicing kung fu in front of a shrine dedicated to a departed loved one. The film’s sweeping score left no need for dialogue as the woman in the film uses martial arts to battle intense feelings of loss and grief reflecting Huynh’s own. 

My first animatic! And its The Adventure Zone! 

and exomis:

Art suggests that the Ancient Greeks were less concerned about underpants, but then they weren’t standing guard on the damp and chilly edge of Empire. The “almost-out” part of wearing a chlamys didn’t seem a great cause for concern, and though art is probably more idealised than reality, Greek culture certainly considered that If the gods gave someone a good body there was nothing wrong about showing it off. What WAS wrong was to dishonour the gift by letting it go to seed and gave extra emphasis to “religiously hitting the gym”.

Since gym(nasium) comes from gymnos - γυμνός, “naked” - and working-out was done in the buff, there was no hiding a lack of reps under baggy sweats.

To evade the stupid porn-not-art bots, I’m not posting full-frontal examples of what happened to a chlamys when the wearer moved - there are plenty if you Google, and this would be typical if complete…

…but the ones I’ve included give a good idea of how much it covered or didn’t.

Figures wearing a chlamys often also wear boots and a broad-brimmed hat called a petasos, sometimes pushed back to give a halo effect. This seems to be visual shorthand for someone on a journey; Odysseus certainly qualifies.

Behind him on the right is Hermes; a hat, chlamys, short chiton (tunic), trademark winged heels / boots and caduceus snake-staff or herald’’s wand are his typical attributes-in-art. (Side note: the double-snake staff isn’t medical, despite appearing on US badges; an Asklepios medical rod has just one snake.)

Sometimes his Roman representations are a bit more, uh, cheeky.

The chlamys looks like something developed by a culture which wore towels at the shoulder rather than round the waist, then decided “bodies are nothing to be ashamed of and we have a hot climate, so why not outdoors as well…”

Oddly enough the Aztecs had a cape or mantle called a tilmàtli which was secured at one shoulder in almost exactly the same way…

Mary Blair’s visual development for Disney Studios (1949 - 1953)

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