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MUSES AND MYTHOLOGIES

I started this series with the Four Seasons. I created sets and photographed my models (none of whom are professional models, but artists and friends) in them. For the Seasons, I over-layered small details of landscapes by Impressionists - Bonnard and Monet, of the seasons my images portrayed to give them brushstrokes like paintings.

The next group I made were the Four Elements. These were basically multiple layers from photographs I’d made all over the world aside from Air, which is basically an altered straight shot.

Next, I created costumes and photographed the entire Zodiac, complete with the constellation of each Astrological Sign.

At that point, I began to think of all the women who have been muses through history, women who have inspired…

For time immemorial, painters, poets, sculptors, novelists, designers, composers, playwrights, photographers, and choreographers have been moved to create by a variety of muses.  Some are real, living beings, and some are the stuff of myth, but the vast majority have been women. This series began when I searched for a way to celebrate the diversity of women, the universal sisterhood of women, and the commonality of women as the inspiration for so much of the art, music, and writing we enjoy.

Muses and Mythologies portrays some of my versions of these inspirations for poetry, music, art, theater, film, and other creative output. The women portraying these fictionalized characters are all real women and they range in age from four and a half months (the baby Jesus, portrayed by a girl baby) to eighty-four years old (Earth).  They are not models, they are students and bartenders, singers and yoga teachers, personal trainers and baristas, ballet dancers, artists, Executive Directors, and appraisers, and they represent all ethnicities; Caucasian, African-American, Latina, Asian, South Asian, and mixed race.  They are single, married, divorced, LGBTQ.  They are mothers with children, and women with grandchildren.

I fashioned sets to photograph some of the muses in, and in other cases, have photographed them in the studio and layered them into photographs I’ve made around the world.  I created costumes appropriate to each muse from an assortment of garments I’ve collected, or altered garments digitally from my own previous photographs.