I foung this old fox on the green down the road at the weekend; the bluebottles were moving in already. A wet leaf was clamped between her paws, she had just lain down to die. It didn’t look like it was dead long,
I felt like CSI Miami taking the photographs.
Funny how that little flash of the most beautiful iridescent blue can evoke this immediate response of yuk- but entirely agree with you.
Anyway, thats life.
I once saw a documentary on death in art and they spoke about this particular artist, I think he was Italian, who produced a string of memento mori for the local upper classes but nobody knows who he was. He used to construct a still life using objects that represented the person’s life and then chuck in some appropriate symbols of death. They were really amazing, I haven’t been able to find images of them since.
I like this, it’s really abstract (which I tend to go for anyway). My only problem is with the extra shine on the left hand side fo the image, it kinda unbalances the whole thing, I think the blue bottle would have a lot more presence if there was less shine on the fur. Of course now I feel like crap because I’m criticising a corpse :-(
Cian, thanks for the comments, That shine is actually a change in the colour of the coat of the fox- doesn’t come out well at this scale. She had quite a lot of grey on her hindquarters. I think I’ll try one like you suggest it , and maybe try to balance it out a little more.
Regarding the art thing, There’s quite a few references I found on wikipaedia-