The wife raced up the stairs to her chamber and posted her sisters on the castle ramparts. She knelt to pray, but instead called out to her sisters.
“Sisters, sisters! Do you see our brothers coming?
“We see a whirlwind, perhaps a dust devil in the distance.”1
Now we are at the scene after he has come home and discovered her ‘treachery’. (Let’s be real though: she was set up to fail.) He intends to kill her but she begs for some time, she says, to make peace with God before she dies. She goes to her room and (I assume) internally calls for her brothers to come save her while asking her sisters to watch for them from the castle ramparts.
All the while, from the lower part of the castle Bluebeard yells warnings to her that her time is up and she must pay with her life.
In the story, since this is a far older tale, the brothers arrive on horseback to save their sister from Bluebeard, charging inside the castle.
What I Was Thinking
I wanted to show the urgency of her waiting for her brothers but also the energy of her brothers arriving in the distance. I really wasn’t sure how that was going to play out.
In the story, her brothers come on horses. In my head I could see a magazine spread with horses spread across two pages, sort of in the distance, kicking up dust on a range but this was not something I had available. After some thinking, it occurred to me that the brothers would be riding in on iron horses – aka motorcycles. And those images we do have in the house in the form of American Motorcycle Magazine! I was starting to feel like this could work.
The Collage Elements
For her side of the spread, the seated version of my woman was perfect (thank you again Anthropologie). She looks tense, literally on the edge of her seat and her expression has a far-away look to it.
While going through magazines, I was initially attracted to the flowers on the clock as they are fake and gilded, which is in keeping with my accidental theme for the spreads. While I was delicately cutting away unwanted bits of paper, I fully realized I was cutting up a fancy clock. In the story, when she asks for time to make peace, the wife/woman specifically requests a ¼ hour. The clock, in it’s full gilded glory, turned out to be perfect.
The windows are from an Architectural Digest magazine – a log “cabin” with a row of windows. Each ‘horse’ has a window and then my joy with the piece ends.
I found that mesh from a zipper pouch which I thought could be like dust screening the brothers. I rushed it. I wish I could pull the damn thing up. I would cut it down into smaller pieces/shapes to be like little dust devil whorls.
Alas. Here we are. This one for sure gets the cringe badge but it is done. This one, too, I kept putting off.
The Look and Feel
Finish Notes
Below is the first version, that sat untouched for a few weeks. It was flat, there was no visual interest and didn’t really feel tied together. I couldn’t figure out what exactly what was bothering me so I spent part of an art hour going through the whole art journal from start to finish. I realized there was no painted or other texture or depth.
Working Notes
Be patient, take your time, there really is no rush for a personal project. In thinking I was taking to long, I was measuring by my own time table. Some things don’t line up as neatly as we would like.
The Bluebeard Series
- Bluebeard – Beginning Again
- Spread 1 – The Ensnaring “Romance”
- Spread 2 – The Search for the Forbidden Door
- Spread 3 – The Bloody Key
- Spread 4 – Do You See Our Brothers? (you are here!)
- Spread 5 – The Gruesome End (spoiler alert)
1 – Quote is from
Pinkoles Este, Ph.D., Clarissa. “Stalking the Intruder: The Beginning Initiation”. Women Who Run With The Wolves, Ballantine Books, 1992, p. 43. (affiliate link)
