Pain and Acceptance - digital artwork in Blender using my full body scan

 In parallel to my research paper, and as a bit of light-relief initially, I've been working on the following image:

I'm calling it "Pain and Acceptance" for obvious reasons, although you can play with "who is pain and who is acceptance". Although I'm pleased with the final image, it was mostly a technical exercise. It started as an 'experiment', in emitters, that rapidly became a experiment in learning the "Repeat Zone" in geometry nodes... God, the evenings I wasted... But not wasted as I learnt a tonne... I really need to get a colorimeter so I can be sure my screen is calibrated - the writing on the wall is probably too obvious on some people's screens, and barely visible on others'....

Working on the "Pink Performance" videos made me suddenly wake up to LIGHT, and it's potential! My initial lighting happened to be quite chiaroscuro so I lent into this. I've just read "An Air of History: Joseph Wright's and Robert Boyle's Air Pump Narratives" as recommended by the Christabel Harley, the guest lecturer. I found the paper fascinating, and the idea of the vanitas fascinating too. Given that Wright of Derby was also a bit of a chiaroscuro fan too, I thought it would be really cool if I could incorporate a vanitas of my own. Interestingly, this became a battle between meaning (which wanted a vanitas in there) and aesthetics (which couldn't add one without spoiling the focus and impact).

Initially I tried to let Tathos lead and just added it, floating unexplained with a skull reflected in the sphere:

Unfortunately, it just looked hammy and confusing, and distracted from the faces. 

In my head, the scene was in an abandoned or damaged house, a powerful symbol, so I added that in, and tried to experiment with adding a candle (another vanitas symbol) and converting the sphere to a light bulb:

I liked the idea, but I couldn't get the candle to back off and let the faces be the focus, despite reducing it to only a few watts of power, and making it's light almost green... So in the end I accepted that image didn't want to go that way, and slowly evolved the piece to the final form above.

Interestingly this image did a couple more things related to my process:

• It made me realise that my work goes through a double-hump - there's peak-ugly, fairly early on, which is about hammering out meaning and composition, and then there's death-by-a-thousand-cuts at the end when I have to hammer out a million small details before I can consider it done
• This image sort of epitomises the work that I have been doing to-date that focuses on my own experience of grief and direct showing, often quite angry, it sort of says "Look at this, LOOK, this happened to me, this hurt so bad, don't tell me the world is not bitter", but I think I need to move beyond this - to accept my pain and use it as a springboard to more universal works that beg questions more gently - I think "A Month in my Head" (the wax heads) is a good initial example of this - it professes to be a record of my mental health, but is more of a gentle parody and problematises our obsession with recording and analysing our mental health