Saturday, January 24, 2015

Kitsune (Foxes) Like to Wear Red

This is the new sculpture, in progress:
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I spoke about her earlier, this fox-headed woman.

I worked on her for a couple of hours tonight, putting on the head and ruff of fur around her neck and extending her arms to the elbow. Tomorrow, I'll take another look and decide whether or not to extend the fur onto her shoulders and pad out the cheeks (to take away from of the deer-ish look to her jawline).  I'll also start on the forearms and paws, one of which will be resting on her hip.

She is corseted into this extreme hourglass shape, as you can see here:
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This is all based on the foxes (kitsune) in Japan. Japanese kitsune are shape shifters, often adopt the form of women, like this one has.
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Kitsune are also a kind of diety; they guard the gates of the shrines to Inari, the goddess of the rice harvest. In Japan, the stone kitsune who are employed this way often wear red bibs, like this:

In honor of that tradition, this is the color I've gone with for the corset:
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Like her Japanese cousins, she herself will be white. I'm also considering adding Japanese-style tattoos to her arms and back. (Since I neglected to add a tail, I might have one "tattooed" on.) I like the idea of it more than I like anticipating the work that will have to go into such an undertaking.  So we'll see.

The Week

It was kind of a sad week this week. Earlier in the week, my great Aunt Alice died and her funeral services and burial were held yesterday.  She was almost 87 years old, which is pretty long-lived for my family.

I don't deal very well with grief, so I've been feeling pretty sad and really drained of energy. I spent most of today in bed, only getting up to go and have dinner with Dave, my mother, and older brother. Dave and I went to the studio after that, and now we're home and I'm back in bed. 

2 comments:

Helen said...

I love your sculpture! It's very cool. I do think it's a little ironic about putting tattoos on a Japanese based statue :-) But I'll be interested to see where you go with this piece.

And I'm sorry about your Great Aunt. Grief is a strange thing. I have a couple of quite long-lived relatives in Canada and Britain and I worry about getting a phone call or email about them.

I hope you have some happy memories of her.

Rosa said...

Hi, Helen,

Thank you. I do have some happy memories of my aunt, which is a good thing to remind myself.

When I was living in Japan, I had two grandmothers and a brother die here in the US and I don't think I ever felt so far away from anything as then. That's when I realized just how far away Japan is from all points Western, as you know.

Anyway, I'm very much looking forward to finishing this sculpture, even though she's got a ways to go!

-Rosa/Brenda