Week One - #3

Stuart Duffin RSA

Your Move

Mezzotint engraving

Stuart Duffin’s Your Move engraving is the next piece that really caught my eye. I love black and white imagery and feel that the multitude of blackness in the image gives you an eerie feeling that you are meant to question. On top of the blackness, I find that the image is a mix of different aesthetics with the woman being like a romantic statue, but the rest of the image is in the modern world. You can’t really tell if the birds or the book she is looking at are smoking or meant to be on fire and this leads you to mysteriously check the text on the left. I like text incorporated in art especially given my emphasis on historical visualization. The snippet of text on the left is just as eerie and mysterious as the image. I can’t tell if the message is meant to be hopeful or ominous if it is meant to be about the virtue of putting yourself first or the vice of it. The dual nature of this piece of artwork is incredibly compelling to the viewer. I find it successful how the images are contained in window like archways to help you perceive that you are looking through to a real scene in the past.