Illustration Friday - Theater

The word of the week for "Illustration Friday" was Theater. I used to love theater in high school, I don't really like acting but I love studying the plays and history and going to the theater to watch plays.

One of my favorite theater genre is "comedia del-Arte" which is basically the root of all modern comedy.The characters are almost always the same, and the plots are very similar, the show doesn't really follow a script but just put up a story guideline that allow the actors to make fun and joke and improvise all the time.

In this illustration I wanted to not only show the characters of the play, but mostly to give the feeling of a theater - the way that theater is a little perfect world of it's own, and so I created a couple of shadow boxes made of paper showing a few of the characters from Comedia del-Arte.

There were supposed to be 4 pieces in this series, but, building stuff out of paper is a pretty fragile thing and one box didn't make it, so I had to change my plans. looking at the figures in the box made me think of those butterflies in display cases and so I decided to give this a shot as well.

dead words butterflies

This started as an illustration Friday piece and sort of grew from there. The word of the week was "canned" which I didn't like at all, but it did made me think of those animals and insects that are preserved in formaldehyde, and how, preservation of something, often destroy it, not because the thing itself is gone, but because the meaning and the use of them is gone, and so a beautiful spontaneous and very fragile thing, like a butterfly, or even a spoken word sometime, becomes useless when it's dead in a box or written down in a book.