The End of “WOMAN • MOVIE STAR • ICON” 2011-2015

I am both happy and sad to announce the long running central project of mine, WOMAN • MOVIE STAR • ICON, is finally finished.

My original intention was to make a set of twenty women in triptych, and after much deliberation and soul searching I decided that the set had achieved all I wanted from it.

The project which began at the end of 2011, has involved a large number of wonderful women who generously helped me achieve my goal of exploring the meaning and parameters of attraction and beauty.

The concept was to explore my own proclivities and to discover what I meant by someone of the opposite sex being beautiful or attractive in the most essential ways. But also and importantly to try and see if I could counter the social fashions and dictates of what advertising and the media tell us to find beautiful.

We are and have been bombarded for years with false and commercially induced images and descriptions of what we should find attractive and what we should value as beautiful, and to set those standards as a measure for all people. In other words it has been dictated to us that certain narrow parameters enclose all that we need as a toolbox to identify and pinpoint what is physically and even spiritually valuable and precious.

Yet human nature is such that it always tries to somehow hook into its own parameters, we by nature look for the custom thing in our lives. No matter how hard one tries to conform most thinking people react against this by choosing partners, for example, who do not match in anyway the given socially acceptable templates. As the old saying goes “the heart wants what the heart wants”.

Anyway. My deepest thanks and expressions of love and appreciation to the women who helped me realise this project. The larger WOMAN project continues on. But the triptych section that is WOMAN • MOVIE STAR • ICON is now closed.

My next move is to take the set to hawk it with galleries somewhere in Europe and try to net a big show and if at all possible a book deal too. Fingers crossed.