I watched Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet, it is a fantastic film - a bit like Shakespeare on acid which is very fitting to my project.
The film is seeped in bright and colourful christian iconography and every location in the movie has a shrine. I love the psychedelic clolours and grandeur of the religious imagery in the movie.
In Mexico there is a tradition of turning non religious things in to iconography. This miniature shrine to Frieda Kahlo is a key example of that. I love the way Kahlo has been made to look like the Virgin of Guadeloupe through the halo and the fact she is holding doves - the Christian symbol of peace.
This shrine was particularly inspiring as it showed me how successful the combination of religious and secular iconography can be.
Dr Bob is an unknown outsider Voodoo artist from New Orleans who creates shrines using everyday and found objects.
I really like the home made and 'found' aspects of his work: the use of paint combined with relics is fascinating. However, I do not feel that the religious elements take enough focus in his shrines and they are not specific to a certain thing, which mine need to be.
At this point I started to think about what to do as my final piece. I looked at the project so far to see if anything stood out for further exploration. Ximena Garrido-Lecca's shrines did.
I decided that creating shrines to my escapisms would be a really good way of combining the religious imagery I have used with the craft-like elements of Felipe Jesus Consalvos' work.
However, I needed to decide on what sort of shrine I should create and so started a long process of exploring shrines and shrine-like imagery.
This is a drawing I did inspired by Felipe Jesus Consalvos. Although it is not a collage I think it has a similarly craft-like element and I have combined religious and everyday imagery.
Felipe Jesus Consalvos was an Cuban outsider artist whose body of work was discovered in Philadelphia in the 1980s. His work consists of collages using religious and political imagery as well as cuttings from cigar boxes, cards and papers as he worked as a cigar roller for much of his life.
An example of one of Felipe Jesus Consalvos' shrines.
I thought his images were quite saint-like and I liked the idea of taking the image of one of my saints and drawing or collageing on top of it. I would also like to explore the idea of layering images from popular culture or magazines and combining it with my saints.
