Near the beginning of the holidays I visited an Ice Cream Parlour near where I live. At this time I hadn't considered what I could concentrate my thoughts on during the summer break until I saw the peacocks there spreading their tail feathers to show their dominance. I was fascinated by the pattern and the colours that they displayed so I went on to consider how I could develop a project from this idea. My initial thought was that the feathers act as a 'disguise' for the birds so I would like to explore more closely the plumage of Peacocks along with the idea of Disguise. The regal colours in the tail feathers could be said to be the peacock's 'costume' because after stumbling across a white peacock on Pinterest, it appears that the colour has been removed from the bird or like it is wearing a costume/disguise.
I carried out two weeks of work experience over the summer at Lime Pictures in Liverpool in the costume and set department of Hollyoaks with a view to experiencing what design is like in industry. The costume department gave me an insight into forming a character over the artistes and made me think more closely about the art of disguise and costume.
After completing the experience at Hollyoaks, I began to brainstorm some different ideas based around the idea of 'disguise' on Pinterest. I wanted to research this idea in more depth and I found a selection of images where the faces of people have been separated and put back together in different compositions or distorted to look like something totally different entirely.
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Waldemar Strempler is an artist that uses collage and digital technologies to create abstract artwork based around the human body.
This image is one of his more simple pieces, playing with the idea of a woman's facial features. The idea of disguise has the connotation of 'covering up' something or 'transformation' in my mind.
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| The Girl with the Peacock Eyes - Anton Bundenko. A way of altering someone's appearance using similar shapes to what is covered. |
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Januz Miralles also alludes to the human face, but covers it slightly with abstract shapes, forming a cover-up, a disguise.
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I would like to now look in more detail at the ideas displayed above as well as removing colour, changing colour and texture and collaging in order to explore the idea of 'disguise' and 'cover-up' more broadly.
