Tableaux

Recently I was asked by someone if I could put up my old drawings for people to see. I have quite a backlog of old drawings waiting to be posted so this will take a while, and thus I think it's best I do so in instalments.
I've been into an artist called Kara Walker for quite a while, and though I don't like to copy too much from another artist, I find her method and her themes intriguing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Walker
She essentially creates huge silhouetted tableaux based on old images from the days in which slavery was an accepted feature of life in the Southern States, and although they're extremely beautifully done (they're all cut out from huge sheets of paper and are very elaborate), the themes are extremely ugly - ironic comments on positions of sexual power and humiliation, suicide and brutality. I like the idea of portraying unpleasant themes with elaborate scissor or penwork, and I especially like the tableaux form - I'm quite into old devotional Christian art from the middle ages, old Dutch masters, etc, and they do a lot involving tableaux. I think that being exposed to a lot of this kind of art has definitely affected the way I draw and probably the subject matter, since I do tend to draw a lot of crosses, or general crusade-era violence.

A segment from 'Camptown Ladies', Kara Walker, 1998. This is a good example of how she portrays themes of sexual exploitation through the use of playful, yet grotesque, imagery.

As such, I have included a number of artworks inspired by - directly and indirectly - Kara Walker, and I will try to say a little about each one, and how they reflect her ethos. 

The central figure of this tableaux is the woman being ridden, rather like the silhouette in 'Camptown Ladies', which was a direct influence. Sex and violence are something I need to address purely because it's all-pervasive, and something I don't think people should shy away from with the ease they seem to, especially when it comes to combining the two. I was especially interested recently to hear of the 'Let's Talk About It' campaign formed in the wake of the Julian Assange sex scandal - http://johannakoljonen.wordpress.com/2010/12/19/lets-talkaboutit/ - and whether or not he is guilty of what he has been accused of, I welcome the journalists who have decided to not just make public their own experiences of the sexual 'grey are', in which nobody is accused of rape, but in which people feel humiliated and betrayed. For me, this is an extremely pertinent question - not just how we can classify rape, but how we respond to what you may choose to call sexual mistakes which, whilst not necessarily rape, can provoke the sense of humiliation and unease we find within Walker's images. There is a sense in the images of unease, abuse of power, which often crosses over into an actual act of violence - but sometimes this imbalance remains a threat, not actualised, and this to me mirrors the kind of relationships and occurrences addressed in the campaign.

Another tableaux not based on the images of Walker, but I suspect there may be some subconscious relationship with the image below.

One of Walker's more brutal images shows the suicide of a woman, an image called 'Cut' - both a vivid description of a suicide and a comment on the authenticity of her art, which is created using a razor blade to achieve the precise lines. 

None of the above images are specifically inspired by Walker, but thematically at least I felt that they should be placed with the above.