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!

Back in Business and "Vamp"ed to Prove It!!

"VAMPED" Copyright 2009 - Louise Ann Stowell - All Rights Reserved

Back in business again and grabbing all the stuff that fell out of my baggage... what I've lost, scattered, gleefully flung or neglected along the way. 

I'm feeling a little mean in my artwork right now...frustrated and pissed off.  Trying to find a full time job to pay the bills is proving to be frustrating.  Not helping my mood...Nope!  Not at all. 

So "Vamp" is what I decided to start my blog out with.  I have also featured some of my work on Altered Art on Facebook and on my own Facebook Page.

What I don't have room to put there is the poetry and stories and off the cuff rants that I have been accustomed to doing on "Breathing Thru My Eyes," my old blogspot site that for some reason I can no longer access and Blogger can't seem to authorize me for. 

Weird...

but then if you know me, you know that nothing in my life since conception was average or normal.  No one would believe me if I wrote my life story down...different sets of coincidences (which, by the way, I do not believe in...but there you are) circumstances, exasperated inspirations, different sets of values and ethics throughout my many reincarnations...bumping along people like walls in an underground and picking up bits and pieces of them as I stumble along the echoing tunnel.

"I'm like that black crow flying

in a blue, blue sky..."

Joni Mitchell  - "Hejira" album

The one thing that hasn't changed in me over the decades is my need to create.

I get moody and anxious, pacing from room to room, thumbing through well worn favorite books for little underlined fragments to set my mind free and my hands busy getting sticky in paper, mediums and paint.  I'll sit down and then get up moments later to pace again....waiting for those scraps to get thrown through the either at me.  The cosmic zookeeper fairy gets a little tardy sometimes in feeding her animals.  I silently rage and roar for my meal...it comes...eventually.

"Vamp" is a postcard in a series I have created dealing with women's emoitions and studies.  She was made from standard watercolor postcard stock, old clippings, and Conti dry pastel backgrounds with a PhotoShopped finish for textures and sharper color effects.

  Ah, Paris

 Hung Jury

 Ornament

 Exiled

 Ghosts

 I would like the...

  Chronicle

Signed, numbered prints of  "Vamp" , "Women's Spirit" (the top title artwork of the blog)  and others are available as 8 x 10 glossy or matte finish.  They are on a limited print run of 100 each.  Pricing details are coming soon!

Thank you for visiting and I hope you'll come back and share your comments and suggestions.

And to the "Archangel"....Michael...thank you for the inspiration as always....