Gail Potocki ~ “Fragmented Alice”, 2013
Gail Potocki is an award-winning Symbolist painter who combines the techniques of the Old Masters with 21st Century themes. With subjects ranging from the extinction of species to circus freaks, Potocki creates dramatic, evocative works in elaborate frames she makes herself, that draw the viewer into worlds of danger and beauty.
"The Century Guild Gallery director, Thomas Negovan, proposed that I create a body of work around the “Alice” theme. At first I was hesitant because I didn’t want to just illustrate the story again since it has been done so many times beautifully in the past and also because many of the characters didn’t seem as relevant today as they did in Lewis Carroll’s time. Instead I decided to reinterpret to a degree what the original story may have been about.
I pretended in my mind that the words and images were torn apart and lying on the ground only to be discovered by me later in history and pieced together. I also saw some of the characters that Alice meets in the story as being aspects of Alice herself or fragments of her cosmic reality. Where Lewis Carroll sees Wonderland as a surreal landscape infused with bits of England that was his home, I decided to use Detroit (my hometown) as a backdrop.” ~ Gail Potocki
-- source: tumblr.
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