Beastly

Since Christmas I have been reading. An awful lot actually. And it's all to do with mythology. It has always interested me, and so I took it on to buy a 'Mythology Bible' and have been reading my mother's very very old children's book with loads of old greek mythology stories. Fascinating. This kinda stemmed from my last project last term called 'Masked.' I took this concept of monstrosities being created from me swapping features around and morphing animals with humans and decided to research where these ideas of monstrosities came from, and started to draw these ideas. There were so many different ideas from all different cultures, and originally I was going to focus on Greek mythology, but I decided to just do the ones I found most interesting. The Greeks monsters were particularly human/animal breeds, and I want to focus on the whole animal/human combination as soon as I can. First though, I did a few drawings with a description next to the creature and the beliefs about it.

Medusa of the Gorgons.

Shapeshifter

Mermaid

Chimera

Next I decided to bring some of these creatures to life and did a photo shoot of me as certain ones. I intended to do it in a non-realistic way as the creatures themselves aren't real...Or are they?
Here are a couple of examples:

VAMPIRE

MY OWN FAKE HUMAN/ANIMAL HYBRID

I have so many plans of what I want to do next. I have had these plans for a while, I just haven't done anything about it. Along this research, I got a book out of the library called 'Abberrations' by Jurgis Baltrusaitis ( translated by Richard Miller) In the book there is a section on the fable of the beast in man- Animal Physiognomy of which starts with a newspaper article of people being compared to animals- they all had a photograph of themselves next to the animals they look like. Some of them are uncanny- some of them not very similar, but amusing all the same. There were a few artists that have done drawings of men's faces and then putting in features of another animal- with amusing results. Le Brun is my favourite because the drawings really are uncanny. I would like to try this out for myself. But the main idea I came up with was based on this artist I found called Alex Castro who has done typical human style portraits except, instead of their normal head, an animal's head is in it's place. I plan on doing some similar portraits with my camera, and then hopefully go on to painting these in detail. I haven't painted in a while, so this is something I really want to do. Hopefully I can make the time to complete this, as I am very passionate about this project!!

Alex Castro

Charles Le Brun