I won't forget them...not even tomorrow

lay back and dive~ 🎵

solo of strel under cut vv

colored in a smol namimi doodle

closeup of face w/o color under cut:

Qifrey’s hair in particular caught my eye. The way it’s layered in conjunction with the clean, flowing lines is so evocative of stonework to me. It looks like it’s his hair has been carved out of the page to look and sit just so, giving the illusion of softness and motion without possessing either quality. The solidity of the line-work creates a feeling of solidity in the image. In so doing, I feel as though I am being invited to recognize that what I am looking is an image. It is not in motion nor can it be. Both artist and audience are allowed to then appreciate it as an image, as work of illusion. I am not being asked to imagine anything, but simply to see what is there. In employing this style, the artist invites us to remember that this is art. It is artifice, the construction of human hands and a human mind. And it is beautiful. It is beautiful because it is artifice, because it was made with purpose. This style does not hide from its artifice, it revels in it.

This, I think, is also a trait shared by Art Deco and bas reliefs in particular. Art Deco is celebratory. It is indulgent. It revels in the wrought-ness of modernity. The subjects of Art Deco works are often machines or industry or men at labour. In centuries after the renaissance, panel painting had become the dominant art form in the west and panel painters were often the first to articulate innovations in style. Art Deco, by contrast, was a movement pioneered by industrial designers — a field that didn’t even exist a century prior — and architects and sculptors. Thus the display of Art Deco works is located in and on and about the same kinds of distinctly modern structures that the style revels in depicting. Unlike the neo-classicists and their slavish adherence to naturalistic depictions of the world or the romantics (and their descendants, the impressionists) and their desire to depict a phenomenological impression of the world, Art Deco discursively imagines the world modernity is constructing. It is aware of its own role in that construction as well as its own constructed-ness. Beyond this recognition then comes celebration. Art Deco is, like Qifrey himself, incredibly optimistic about the world it is participating in the construction of.

To round out the post, here are some more panels and some more Art Deco pieces:

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(From Vancouver’s Marine Building)

La Danse, bas-relief on the façade of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées by Antoine Bourdelle (1912)

The cornucopia – Avenue des Champs-Élysées no. 77 in Paris, unknown architect (c. 1930)