Too Cute?

I’m not really sure what I have done here. Cute? Horror? Bazar? I really don’t know. My wife walked by as I was making this image and her response was “Ewww!! What the hell is that?!?!” To which I responded “Isn’t it cute?”, she walked away. The oversized respirator adds to the horror aspect of the image, the large eyes that have a very fuzzy or milky quality to them, the pupil formed only partially all at to the uneasy feeling I get when I look at it. Big eyes are cute right? Like many of Mark Ryden’s paintings….wait, are those cute , or just creepy??

This image may haunt me and when I send it to my brother, the photo of is his son, he most certainly will never forgive me. But on some level isn’t that the point? To create work that challenges the viewer in some way, to make the viewer walk away and think about it and at some point in the future return to the mental image. 

Is it worse to view the image as an on looker or be the image’s creator? After all you know what went into making it, but it does ask questions about how and why your creative process led you to the outcome. I will probably put this image deep within my archives so I don’t accidently come upon it.