Puppet Challenge: the ‘overflow’ gallery

I promised that I would post some of the puppets made by the Puppet Challengers that didn’t appear in the official posts, because we’d decided broadly to confine the exhibition to one puppet per person. I snuck two in for Scott Garrett, but as both Lynne Lamb and Philippa Robbins made many puppets, I decided to save the extra ones for showing after the main event.

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Philippa Robbins: Blue

Philippa chose Frida Kahlo as her subject for the Puppet Challenge, an artist who painted many self-portraits that effectively mythologised her appearance. But in the process of making Frida, Philippa was producing a whole cast of glove-puppet characters. Here are some of them.

Below: the Diva

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Below: the Prisoner

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When Philippa came to stay with us at Penparc Cottage, her puppets came too, and this is the sight that greeted my trip to the loo one morning!

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He has lots of tattoos. These are pictures taken during the process of making him.

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Finally, Philippa produced a pair of puppets made in the likeness of her and her husband, for his birthday: Mini Philippa and Dave!

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The images printed onto the hospital gowns are from drawings Philippa produced.

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Below, Philippa at work in her kitchen, shortening a puppet’s neck with a saw!

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Lynne Lamb: Bog Body

Lynne’s first puppet was a Frost Witch. She began with digital-renderings made on a tablet.

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From the very first time I saw the renderings, I loved her vision of the character. Not pale and beautiful, the way Snow Queens are usually portrayed, but frost-blackened, leathery and pinched, like a bog-body preserved in peat. Deeply creepy, especially when arrayed in sparkles and icy lace.

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Finally, the puppet as realised, and it doesn’t disappoint. I love those twiggy, scratchy fingers.

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Below: Lynne’s portrait of the puppet. What started as digital renderings, and then became a creature of papier-mâché, at the conclusion was reinvented as paint on canvas. The puppet as muse and model!

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The Puppet Challenge Part 12: Peter, Ben, Lucy and Lynne

Peter Slight, Ben Javens and Lucy Kempton, with a guest-appearance by Lynne Lamb

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Peter Slight initiated the idea of a Puppet Challenge at the Artlog, and thereafter researched and approached many of the artists and makers who would go on to produce puppets for it. Last year his jaunty artwork (see above) announced the Challenge, and thereafter he compiled a number of the ‘puppet posts’ that we jointly provided to encourage the contributors. I am much obliged to him for all his hard work.

Peter Slight: return to the horned man

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Peter Slight set his heart on making a ‘horned Man’ puppet from the outset of the Challenge. I’m touched that he chose a folkloric character close to my own heart. It’s no secret here at the Artlog that last year Peter tracked me down and identified me as the anonymous designer of a theme-park attraction that long pre-dated my career as a painter, in which a horned man made an appearance. Peter says that seeing my work on that project when he was at an impressionable age, definitely tipped him into the love of British folklore that informed his choice of career as an artist.

Peter writes:

“If all the artists who you have inspired dedicted just one piece of work to you, it would amount to a LOT of work! I myself was inspired by your work over 20 years before I even found out who you were! (And I’m still being inspired by you.)”

“Thanks again, I can honestly say this is one of the best things I’ve ever been involved with, it’s been a real pleasure and privilege doing my little bit.”

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Above: the puppet as originally conceived by Peter

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Below: his Horned Man as realised.

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Ben Javens: Jack-the-Green

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Like Peter Slight, Ben Javens is an illustrator, and it’s interesting how both have brought the style of their more usual work to their puppets. Anyone knowing Ben’s graphic output would immediately recognise this Jack-the-Green puppet as being his.

Ben Javens illustration: All Around my Hat

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Interesting too, that neither Ben’s Jack-the-Green or Peter’s Horned Man have arms, which lends them a particularly naive charm. I think they hail from the same universe.

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Lucy Kempton: Fairy Melusine

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I was delighted when I heard that Lucy Kempton was making a version of the French sorceress, Melusine, because it was a tale that I had discovered when studying the ravishing miniatures of the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, in which in flying serpent form, she makes an appearance. That’s her above the red-roofed tower to the right.

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Lucy writes beautifully of the story, and so I shall leave her to tell it in her own words, as well as with a lovely quote from Jean d’Arras.

“I chose the mythical figure of Melusine, who is something of a favourite of mine. I was determined to make her from old felted jumpers, old t-shirts, scraps of wool and other textile and knitting-related materials which were waste or which I had already, and knowing I would leave the making of her quite late and be short of time, and that sewing to any kind of perfectionist standard often discourages and deters me from finishing things, I would deliberately make her in a rough and improvisational manner. In fact on researching the story, I learned that one of the best known versions of it from the Middle Ages was that of Jean d’Arras, and was part of a cycle of stories designed to be told by ladies at their spinning and needlework, which seemed appropriate.”

“The tale goes that Raymond of Poitou, founder of the House of Lusignan, came across a beautiful woman, Melusine, in the forest one day. Instantly smitten, he proposed marriage, and she was happy to consent, only exacting the condition that he should never seek to find her on a Saturday. She bore him many fine children and brought him much wealth. Of course in myth, as in life, if you make someone promise things like that, the one thing they want to do is break the taboo and find out. Raymond had to go looking, and found Melusine at her Saturday ablutions. (In some versions simply in the bath at home, and in others in a forest pool or spring, the kind of place associated with her.)”

“Oh dear, she was all serpentine from the waist down, and, many of the tales say, with a double tail!”

 

“Raymond was shocked, as was Melusine.”

“Then she was furious.”

 

“But also deeply saddened. Jean d’Arras has her say these words:”

 

Ah! Raymond, the day when I first saw you was for me a day of sadness! Alas! for my bane I saw your grace, your charm, your beautiful face. For my sadness I desired your beauty, for you have so ignobly betrayed me. Though you have failed in your promise, I had pardoned you from the bottom of my heart for having tried to see me, not even speaking of it to you, for you revealed it to no one. And God would have pardoned it you, for you would have done penance for it in this world. Alas! my beloved now our love is changed to hate, our tenderness to cruelty, our pleasures and joys to tears and weeping, our happiness to great misfortune and hard calamity. Alas, my beloved, had you not betrayed me I were saved from my pains and my torments, I would have lived life’s natural course as a normal woman, I would have died in the normal way, with all the sacraments of the Church, I would have been buried in the church of Notre-Dame de Lusignan and commemorative masses would have been observed for me, as they should. But now you have plunged me back into the dark penitence I have known so long, for my fault. And this penitence, I must bear it until Judgement Day, for you have betrayed me. I pray God to pardon you.

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“Though some say she forgave him his curiosity and for seeing her, but couldn’t do so when later in a public row he called her a serpent. She resumed her serpent form and disappeared back into the forest, never to be seen again.  But she’d got to found the royal house of Luxembourg first.”

 

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Lucy was not the only contributor to turn to Melusine as as source of inspiration. Lynne Lamb too made a puppet of the siren/sorceress. Lynne has already featured in the Puppet Challenge with her fantastic wolf puppets, but as she also made a marionette of Melusine, I’m adding it here, to keep Lucy’s version company.

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Below: Lynne’s Melusine being made.

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The Puppet Challenge Part 8: Lynne, Graeme and Anna

Lynne Lamb, Anna Marchi and Graeme Galvin

Lynne Lamb: Big Bad Wolves and Puppet Portraits

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Lynne was so quick off the mark with the Puppet Challenge, that she was deep into creativity a bare week after it had been announced. To that end I’m going to include her… alongside Philippa Robbins, another who made many puppets… in an ‘overspill gallery’ toward the end of the exhibition, the better to do justice to what was produced.

For today I’m going to look at Lynne’s work on the theme of the wolf. It was never specified whether there was any particular mythic aspect she was examining. I’m assuming Red-Riding-Hood, though she may well have been exploring more generally the wolf’s role as the villain in folklore and fairy-tale. The journey began with digital sketches.

One of things that was immediately apparent in the work posted at her blog, is that Lynne is an artist down to her fingertips. She draws beautifully, even when the idea is just to get something down quickly. None of the sketches shown here were realised as puppets looking very much like them, but I think at this stage Lynne was playing with ideas. One of her great strengths is that she’s flexible about realisation, and once the making is underway, she allows it to carry her where it will, regardless of the starting points.

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Above and below: digital concept sketches

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Below: taking us into the realms of Greek myth and Cerberus, the three-headed Guardian of the Underworld

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Below: this might be a take on werewolf iconography…

… and these two are indisputably werewolf-ian!

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Below: once the puppets were underway, they romped off as though entirely confident of what they wanted/needed to be.

Above and below: Not one wolf under construction in Lynne’s studio, but many.

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The three-headed wolf initially manifested as a demonic beast…

…and then donned a frock and acquired some strings to transform into this rather sinisterly winsome marionette, a three-headed grandma-impersonator in floral-print and flounces!

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Elsewhere, a glove-puppet came into being, with needle sharp teeth and mad, yellow eyes.

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And finally, the journey begun in a virtual paint-box, arrived in the world of corporeal pigment and brushes, and a series of puppet-portraits emerged that I absolutely love.

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Graeme Galvin: The Canterville Ghost

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I’ve known Graeme Galvin since I was teenager, when he was the designer at the Caricature Theatre in Cardiff, the puppet company I joined shortly after leaving school. Graeme designed and made so many of the puppets that I cut my teeth on, and so it’s a delight to present here the marionette he’s made for the Artlog Puppet Challenge. Graeme is, I think, the only long-time professional puppet-designer/maker who has taken part in the challenge. Time to salute a master.

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Anna Marchi: Bluebeard

I haven’t been able to discuss puppet-making with Anna, as there has been a language barrier. But on completing him, at her blog she announced… in Italian, of course…

“Bluebeard! Finally! I finished the puppet version of Barbablu, and here he is, in all his cruel elegance!”

I like the phrase ‘cruel elegance’. I’m reminded of John Malkovitch as the viperish Vicomte Sébastien de Valmont in the film version of Christopher Hampton’s play, Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

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Below: the stages of making, starting with Anna’s concept drawing

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I see no strings or control-rods on this haughty ‘Barbablu’, and I suspect his role in life is to be an ‘artist’s maquette’ in Anna’s studio. We shall have to wait to see whether he appears in any paintings.

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progress on the puppet challenge

It’s been a while since I posted about the Puppet Challenge and its contributors, so here’s a catch-up, reporting progress by some of the makers who’ve sent us news. I regularly check the websites and blogs of participants, but if any of you have made progress that you’ve not yet shared at your sites but would like us to post at the Artlog, please drop me or Peter Slight a line with some images.

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Philippa Robbins

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Philippa Robbins has made an entire cast of wonderfully characterful ‘blue-heads’, of which this is one. She’s still playing with ideas and isn’t yet a hundred percent certain whether they’re to be glove-puppets or some other type. But it’s interesting that as an artist, she’s found a way to make her puppets completely of her own creative universe, and in a room-full of puppets I would know them as hers. I’m sure that however she resolves them, they’re going to be appearing in her drawings and paintings before very long.

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Jill Desborough

Artist Jill Desborough writes:

‘Attached are a couple of images of designs for two puppets I’ve started. The Spring one might be the 1st in a quartet of the Seasons. He is a a slavic god called Jarilo who comes from the underworld every spring bringing growth and fertility. I am making him androgynous in a flower and leaf strewn gown.’

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‘The other is a bird-headed figure who I see as a guardian/watcher of borders- who will be all in black- a bit ambivalent …malevolent or protective I’m not sure. The image came into my mind on the train … he is I guess from my own mythological library rather than the historic canon.’

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Liz King

Painter Liz King is underway not just with puppet designs, but for an entire story-boarded legend of the Loubérou or Lébérou, known in various rural areas of France. The story is of a man who turns into a goat after bathing in an enchanted fountain. You can read the full scenario at her blog, but here’s an extract from it:

‘He reads the watery words, stands up and with hands on hips, tosses his head in disdainful disbelief. But it feels top-heavy and cumbersome. He reaches up to feel two unfamiliar shapes protruding from it, hears the clop of hoof on horn. Lowering his hands he sees with horror two cloven hooves where hands should be. Slumping down onto all fours, he lets out a prolonged and enfeebled bleat. From the black waters of the fountain the reflection of a wild, long-haired goat stares out at him.’

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I love Liz’s visualisation of the fountain-source as a giant bearded head, like a Roman river-god spewing words written in the black water.

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Karen Godfrey

Artist Karen Godfrey writes:

‘I have decided after much deliberation to make a marionette of Frida Kahlo.  She is a favorite of mine and I thought I would be able to use her the most for occassions such as, Day of the Dead.  What also appealed to me were the endless amounts of outfits, accessories, jewelry, etc I could make for her. 

I made her head out of foam covered with polymer clay.  Then I painted her with acrylic paint.  The body, arms, and legs were made out of wood.  I haven’t made her feet yet.  I am using leather straps for the hinges at her elbows and knees.  I also will be adding hair to her.

‘This has been a lot of fun so far.’

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Since writing the above, Karen has finished her Frida Kahlo puppet, and has sent us wonderful images of her standing on a specially made Day of the Dead stage, surrounded by coloured lights and sugar skulls. Marvellous!

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Matt and Amanda Caines

Matt Caines is a sculptor, and Amanda Caines is an artist with a multi-discipline approach to her work. Matt has written of their work toward the Puppet Challenge:

‘We are currently engaging in the darker side of fairy stories and folklore and are producing a series of free standing pieces and some wall hangings. We are combining my interest in structure, assemblage and engraving on shed antler, with Amanda’s sense of colour and pattern in her stitch worked sections.

 

 

The horse is inspired by the legend of the Kelpie, a malevolent Scottish equestrian water spirit that lures lone travellers into rivers and lakes and gives them a dunking. Ireland has the Each-Uisage who inhabits seas and lochs. After carrying his victims into the water, the Each-Uisage devours them.’

 

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‘The puppet and drawings that match are inspired by Sedna, the Inuit goddess of the sea and all its creatures. Poor Sedna was thrown out of a boat by her angry father, who to stop her holding on to the side, chopped off her fingers. As she sank into the murky depths, her fingers turned into seals, walruses, fish, whales and all the sea life.        

Now she lives at the bottom of the sea, angry at all men, sometimes bringing famine, sometimes plenty. Shamans swim down to appease her by combing her hair and begging for mercy. 

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Amanda is creating a bound skirt for Sedna that will be patterned with a fragmented fish-tail pattern. Her face will be a mixture of shamanic mask imagery filtered though cubist fragmentation.’ 

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Scott Garrett

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Scott Garrett is rocking with the Puppet Challenge. This, the Whittlesea Straw Bear, is his second folk-tradition based glove-puppet, the first having been a magnificently realised Earl of Rone. (I’m saving images of that for the online exhibition, though if you can’t wait, you can see some at Scott’s Blog.)

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Lynne Lamb

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Lynne Lamb has already stormed ahead in the Puppet Challenge with her ‘bog-body’ reinvention of the Snow Queen and a splendid ship’s figurehead mermaid. Now she’s come up with this deceptively winsome multiple-headed wolf-in-grandma’s-clothes, that cleverly riffs on notions of multiple identities and the three-headed canine guardian of the Kingdom of the Dead, Cerberus.

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Caroline McCatty

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Caroline is making her own version of a novelty that delighted nineteenth century audiences. The ‘transformation puppet’ was the Victorian puppet showman’s coup de théâtre, his blink-and-you-miss-it sleight-of-hand that would leave viewers perplexed and delighted. A popular subject was ‘The Grand Turk’, a figure that dissolved in the blink of an eye into many smaller puppets scattering in all directions. For her Puppet Challenge subject Caroline decided on the story of an ogre who goes in disguise as a little girl, and if I’ve understood her correctly, her puppet is intended to transform from small child to to outsized monster in an instant. In the photograph of this puppet-in-progress we see the girl’s head lying atop the large head of the ogre. The latter is of a soft construction, and I believe is intended to pack into a small, hidden place, from which it then inflates to effect the trick. Although I don’t know the details of how she plans this, Caroline is certainly on the right track, as in the nineteenth century collapsible puppets pre-rigged ready to burst out were the basis of many transformation marionettes. You can see two nineteenth century transformation puppets HERE.

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Nomi McLeod

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Nomi’s puppet-in-progress stares out at us with troubled eyes. This hauntingly beautiful head is her starting point for the intriguingly titled ‘The Girl Without Hands’, a tale that it sound as though Shakespeare may have borrowed from for Titus Adronicus.

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The Puppet Challenge becomes altogether more stimulating as a creative experience when contributors share ideas and progress with us. For those of you who’ve so far remained silent on the matter, get in touch and let us know what you’re up to. A thumbnail sketch, a reference image or just a few words by way of ideas you may have, will help enrich all who’ve signed to this project. We’d love to hear from you.

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The Snow Queen

Above: Lynne Lamb’s Snow Queen puppet with a digitally rendered costume.

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At her blog, painter Lynne Lamb’s enthusiasm for the Puppet Challenge has resulted in an extraordinary creativity. Her Snow Queen, while still a ‘work-in-progress’, is already brimming with a strange and oddly un-nerving creepiness.

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Above: original design

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Above: the puppet-making underway

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This is a Snow Queen like no other I’ve ever seen. Lynne wrote in her first post on the subject that she imagined the Queen to be frost-blackened, and immediately I was thrilled by the idea of the character radically reinvented. Not the conventional icy beauty, white-skinned like a vampire, but as dark and leathery as the ancient bodies that occasionally emerge preserved from peat bogs.

Lynne isn’t yet satisfied with the movement of her puppet, but she’s hit the ground running as far as character is concerned. It’s wonderful to watch the lightning-in-a-bottle effect when an artist/maker is rocking and rolling with an idea.

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Above: the puppet as realised

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