Vertigo

"Vertigo" 2006 - Copyright - Louise Ann Stowell - All rights reserved

The day that I came up with the concept for this picture, I had just gotten through watching the classic Hitchcock movie, Vertigo.  Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak were sensational.  The location of San Francisco in the 1958 took me back to when I was a kid being taken by my Dad and Grandmother all over the city.

I have a fear of heights that I have tried to get over since I was in junior high.  I could understand the problem Jimmy Stewart was portraying trying to deal with climbing up the Stanford clock tower.  I went to Coit Tower in 2008 and went up the overly packed elevator up to the top.  I was fine until I got to the window and saw the coins laying on the sill ledge and then my eyes traveled past the ledge to the concrete below. My breath hitched in my throat.  Pure terror!   Back up against the inside wall, it took everything I had to remove my clawed fingers from the plaster, to pose for a picture with my former husband, Tony, standing with our backs to the window.  I felt like I was going to tip over and out the window, even though I knew it was impossible due to the heavy Plexiglas covering it. Breathe...breathe, focus on something...oh, look at the big circle of open space above me.  Nope!  Gotta get down...NOW!!!

Vertigo was fun to put together and play with. It was originally composed as a photo using graph paper and a clothes hanger hook. The graph paper was turned from a positive to negative.  I then placed a photo on top of it and began copying it and digitizing it in PhoroShop, layering the pattern, Next I printed it on matte paper and added lines with chalk/pastels and rubbing wet fingers to smear out lines.  It was much more fun than the few minutes atop Coit!