Cy Twombly & Hat

From this project I have learnt more about lateral thinking. About not being too obvious and pastiche and also about how far you can take something before is becomes too distant from the original concept.

Researching Cy Twombly on Wikipedia and in books such as Coronation of Sesostris & Audible Silence, I found he has a very keen interest in music, poetry and Greek mythology and these are the subjects that many of his works are based upon. Rather than draw or paint a person or an object, Twombly wants to capture the emotions of the piece. Twombly is a concept artist and his works are not intended for immediate realization. I found this very daunting as many of Twombly’s works could be written off as childish scribbles and doodles so I thought it would be difficult to capture this free spiritedness, create a graphic response that communicates some form of message and also create something that is not pastiche.

The object I chose was a hat. What I found interesting was the many sayings, metaphors, etc that originate from the common hat e.g. ‘To keep it under your hat’, ‘At the drop of a hat’, etc. I was really interested in the old saying ‘As mad as a Hatter’. This comes from the novel ‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll where the character the Hatter is described as being mad for one reason or another. It was this connection to an old tale and the hat that I thought would be a good starting point as my artist was inspired by old tales and legends. I understood that Alice in Wonderland wasn’t Greek mythology but my thinking was to get a story or a tale that interested me and create something as a response to that as this is how Twombly works.


I decided to focus on a tale that interested me: Jack the Ripper, a story that has become the stuff of legend as the killer was never caught, his motives remain unknown and conspiracy theories run riot. I have always been fascinated by the Jack the Ripper saga and the connection to my object, a hat, was based on the consistent description of Jack the Ripper: cloak, dagger and top hat. I didn’t believe that this was too loose a connection to my object as if you take away Jack’s hat then he isn’t instantly recognizable anymore. The hat is part of his make-up. Also, in the eighteenth century headwear was a sign of class. The fact that Jack wore a top hat (accompanied with many other factors) had led to many theories that his mission of murder was in fact connected to a higher cause.


I wanted to design and make five different images about Jack the Ripper that weren’t too obvious but at the same time not too ambiguous. I didn’t use actual objects but more letterforms, words, calligraphy, etc. This style was similar to Twombly’s in the fact that it demanded a little bit more investigation to understand but were also interesting images to look at in themselves. The look and feel of the images would be old, decadent, grim and dark – many styles I associate with eighteenth century London in the slums. My final representation of my images was to frame them and display them on a wall as thought they are in an art gallery or museum. Twombly’s works are in many art galleries and images and artifacts from the Ripper saga would be in a museum.

REFERENCES:
Internet: Wikipedia, The Guardian Online
Books: The Hat: Trends & Traditions’ by Madeline Ginsberg, Audible Silence: Cy Twombly at Daros, Coronation of Sesostris, Tate Gallery Booklet on Twombly Exhibition