Bowie Eyes, or full title Ich, is a segment of my art work crated in traditional oil on canvas technique in 1995.
Bowie Eyes
It was exhibited as an element of the group of paintings in 1996 at the Faculty of Fine Arts Gallery in Belgrade, Serbia. The exhibition was a part of my final exam at the Master of Fine Arts program.
Some elements of my postmodernist art or postmodernism style are included in this painting. Those elements are: dog-tooth pattern, symbols from the pop-culture, some textual messages etc. There are also influences from another popular media present here.
The size of a painting is not very big.
Also, there is some fictional character created in kind of cartoonish style which came to light on this painting. Apparently, the character is hissing some version of a German word “ich”, which means “I”. This is the reason why the original title of this painting is ICH. But, while creating the painting, I used another phonetic symbol of the same sound. This is Serbian word written in Serbian alphabet. This sound is used in slang to tell somebody to ‘go away’ and obviously has completely different connotation.
It is more interesting to me to pay attention on the idea or a question which emerged as a motif of the painting. This is an idea or a spiritual concept about “self”, “ich”, “I”, “I am”, “who am I” etc.
Beside this, the painting also belongs to a group of paintings which refer to musician David Bowie.
Why this particular painting is associated to him? Because of the idea of sound, an element of the music, present here on the painting, an object of visual media.
I am usually not very fond of implementing real sound or music in my visual art work, particularly in new media art work.
In this artwork the idea of sound is not implying the real sound which can be perceived by the sense of hearing.
It is more about the kind of internal sound, which occurs somewhere in observers internal spheres.
Sometimes, maybe it is just a whisper. Or a joyous scream or God knows what.
Except the sound, there is another association to the famous musician, his eyes, and this is the title of the painting: Bowie eyes.
