The Cupid Shroud

Katelyn Parker
Cupid Decays
Mixed Media Digital Painting, 2014

APPROPRIATING CULTURAL TEXTS

When I began this project for my final year of Fine Arts study I struggled to find a way to get around the issue of offending another culture.  We all have symbols of our cultural and social beliefs, our flag and national anthem and even our football club's song all have special meanings about something that identifies a unique set of beliefs.
For the Ancient Greek society their mythical tales of Gods and Goddesses communicated their beliefs about themselves and their place in the world.   

In using, or appropriating, the image of Cupid I am attempting to describe the way that Western, initially the European Renaissance artists, societies have taken a cultural text with very specific cultural meanings and adapted the text to suit their own needs and purposes.
The Renaissance artists took Cupid and transformed him from an adolescent male into the sentimental infant of their paintings in order to appeal to fashion in art of their time.  In a way this was no more sensitive to the original owner than the way that our consumer culture has approached the appropriation of Cupid and the re-branding of the figure to suit its own needs.
In the two images here I am looking at and experimenting with the digital distortion of Cupid as I begin to work towards creating a final body of work for assessment.  I'm not sure at this stage whether the final work will be digital or traditional mediums, or even a mix of the two.

 Unless otherwise stated all images have been sourced from Wikimedia Commons and have been assigned a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License or are from the Public Domain

All of my artworks unless otherwise stated are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license (Version 4.0 (international licence)