LION
BY LARS RUSSELL
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Hey remember just a few days ago when we were talking about how painters never made babies’ heads the right size until the Renaissance? How the babies’ heads were all out of proportion, like the size of an adult human compared with the size of its body. I mean I couldn’t believe it never occurred to anyone to look and notice that your head barely grows at all while your body chutes out in every possible direction during adolescence. And that, retroactively, it means babies heads are way too big. Cartoon-like big, like a fetus. Because they recently were fetuses. And you said it’s not that they didn’t realize babies’ heads were big but that art had a more iconic role, that it wasn’t meant to represent life accurately—that it was actually considered a sin to reflect real life. But I was like it doesn’t matter anyway because its not like European art was all there was. Look at African sculptures and for god’s sake Easter Island! Well I was thinking and you know how we were eating at that Thai restaurant earlier that night? And I pointed out my grampa has a tattoo of the lion from the Singha bottle. So I’ve been looking at that lion and, you know, it’s not the most realistic lion either. Like it seems like all Thai art and even southeast Asian art in general draws and carves these animals with sort of an abstract flourish, and it never looks anything like a live beast but you know you can tell what it is. I mean I would look at a lion and I would have never even thought of making it look like that, with those lips and hoops and stripes so it kind of looks like a cross between a flower and a dragon and a dog. But I think maybe I like it better that way. It’s more fun and I can’t tell you how boring it would be to see statues of all these regular lions. But what surprises me is that there doesn’t seem to be disagreement among the Thai people who made the art. Like I expect at least one person would be like let’s make it look like a real lion, and a lot of people would probably say hey that makes sense. So you’d think it would have been hard to convince people the crazy flamboyant lion looks better or even worth trying. But it rocks. I see those lions all over the place. And people figured that out way before bothering to make babies’ heads the right size. [Forever after at http://eyeshot.net/larslion.html] * |
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