What a screaming tension for an outsider to her halls. This is where digital can get titillating.

May I use this picture for a refrence for my English project on Romeo and Juliet

Hm...not sure. Mind you that image could be bordering on horror, Imagine that sequenied underwear was the latest fashion for guys...ew!

I love this image and chose it for my first assignment in Reading The Visual this semester at uni...

warning, it's way over the top and silly...

Renee Dillon s2620184
Reading the Visual
Semester 2, 2007
Assignment 1

The purpose of this short essay is to interpret The Rat Queens Wedding, a digital painting by Socar Miles, via the use of standard semiotic and visual analysis techniques. These will include the signs, the central codes, the use of metaphor and genres utilised within the visual text. Central to this reading are the signs, signifiers and the signified.

The title of the work, The Rat Queens Wedding, gives us our first clue as to what, on the surface, the work is about. It is the wedding day of a queen. The traditional white dress, of a western world marriage is present and helps to solidify the title. The almost monochromatic sepia tones of the image help to inform the viewer that the image is portraying something old; perhaps it is a photograph or painting from the late 19th century. By dating the image in such a way comparisons between this image and the photographs of the late 19th centaury and early 20th centaury can be compared.

The Honourable Mrs Griffiths and The Honourable Mrs Molesworth are two typical images of this type(Clarke, 1992 p. 23); women posed in their wedding dress, demurely gazing into the distance or at the viewer. These images are shot in a studio or grand room of a wealthy house, in ¾ profile, in keeping within a long tradition of portraiture (Clarke, 1992 p. 47). However similar the Rat Queen is to these two images she can not be said to be doing anything demurely. She is better compared to Baroness Hayashi, an atypical example of early 20th centaury female portraiture.

The Baroness, like the Rat Queen, displays distain for the viewer. In both images the subjects features, though beautiful, are not softened as is more commonly the case and she is shot from below, casing the viewer to “look up” and see her as dominant and powerful. These features make The Rat Queens Wedding comparable with royal portraiture throughout pre 21st centaury Europe (Gwynne-Jones, 1950 p. 205). These portraits often display male subjects seen from a low angle, with dramatic lighting and expressions of confidence, arrogance and power (Pope-Hennessy, 1966 p. 36). The paintings of Fernando VII and Joseph-Bonaparte are key examples of this genre.

Female subjects often appear demure or simply beautiful; it is only when the monarch is the sole ruler that they too must conform to this male display of power (Gwynne-Jones, 1950 p. 114). This can be demonstrated by two conflicting paintings of Princess Victoria of marriageable age, and later Queen Victoria after her husband’s death (Pope-Hennessy, 1966 p. 87). It is noteworthy that The Rat Queens Wedding portrays this same feeling of the dominant, powerful monarch, yet it is on her wedding day. This implies, along with other noticeable signs, that she is not prepared to share power or is to be the more forceful partner.

Two of these subtle signs are found by examination of the Queens wedding dress. The corset lacing is quite loose. Corsets, by their very design, create restricted breathing and movement for the wearer and where a common feature of female fashion for hundreds of years (Tobin, 2003 p. 117). This corset, by being loosened announces to the world that the Rat Queen will not be restricted, by fashion or anything else.

The other is the rats. At first glance there are no rats in the image, but closer inspection of the base of the skirt of the dress reveals a flowing mass of rats. The skirt itself, by bring so voluminous, represents fertility and by placing these two elements together it almost seems that the Queen has metaphorically given birth to the rats, they are her children and/or that she has some power over them. If not there already, this firmly places the image within the field of the fantastical, conjuring mystical stories. Such a mass of rats would be terrifying to behold, the Queens power over them implies some sort of dark fairytale like power (Warner, 1999 p. 386). This perhaps is the base of her confidence and authority.

So far The Rat Queen’s Wedding has only been compared to portraiture of real people via painting and photograph, but it is part of a larger genre. It is part of a trend of digitally created art. These painterly images, containing rich texture and colour composition, are often heavily influenced by the forms and lighting Manga and computer games, just as much as by traditional media. It’s content not rehashings of classical scenes or styles (McArdle, 1984 p. 85) but new images from imaginary worlds found in fantasy and science fiction literature. Examples of this style of art include Blood Elf, Melchial, Lord of Nightmares and Blind Justice.

There is also another genre in which this image neatly fits. The artist used herself as the model. This snippet of information firmly plants the idea in the viewers mind that this is a self portrait, of a kind. It is certainly not representational of any real events, but perhaps reflects a subconscious wish to be, like the rat queen, powerful, in control of her own destiny, beholden to no one. It can be said that “as an artistic genre, portraiture attempts to reconcile how we appear and how we wish to be represented (Unknown, 2007).” This is almost certainly the case with The Rat Queens Wedding


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I told you it was over the top and silly!















References
Clarke, G. (ed) 1992, The Portrait in Photography, Reaktion Books, London

Comfort, A 1997, A good age, Mitchell Beazley, London.

Gwynne-Jones, A. 1950, Portrait painters : European portraits to the end of the nineteenth century and English twentieth-century portraits, Phoenix House, London

McArdle, L. 1984, Portrait drawing: a practical guide for today's artists, Englewood Cliffs, N.J

Pope-Hennessy, J. 1966, The Portrait in the Renaissance, Phaidon, London

Tobin, S. 2003, Marriage à la mode: three centuries of wedding dress, The National Trust, London

Unknown. Retrieved August 16, 2007, from
[link]

Warner, M. 1999, No Go the Boogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.

Further Reading:

Retrieved July 25, 2007, from
[link]

Amazing.