Maze
Watersoluble pencil over detail and wash in black ink, 9 x 9 inches, 2003.
'Maze' - drawing by Nancy Farmer.
This one took me such a long time - the trouble was I got rather into working out the perspective mathematically, and had a look at some constructions in perspective of chequed floors... and then I noticed that if the floor was constructed in a certain way, with three vanishing points not all on the same level, the result was a gently curved floor like something seen through a slightly fish-eye lens. And I got all excited (in a nerdy way) and started constructing the skeleton of the picture in such a way that everything kind of curved in, but mathematically so. And after about 30 hours of buggering about with perspective and generally experimenting I finally got round to doing the actual picture. The stone balls took me long enough in themselves, as if you look closely you'll see each one is a map of the world.
There's no point looking for any meaning in this, by the way - I simply like the idea of a maze and I put stuff in that I thought would be interesting...
On the subject of mazes and perspective, a more recent painting is Mrs Monotaur II (click the thumbnail to see it), where I was completly cavalier about any real use of perspective and, basically, cheated. I like this approach, also! But the difference is that the floor of the Maze in Mrs Minotaur II is not all level, and the tiles are not all square - in the picture of the Maze above there is nowhere to hide any mistakes or miss-matches. Besides, the crow would know if I'd cheated, and he'd tell the little girl - and then there'd be trouble...