Hi folks! Not often you hear from me on a Saturday, but I have a few minutes spare - and I am dying to share with you my latest comic book frame. I'm rather proud of this one. There is another picture which fits between this image and the one I posted last time, but it is this one I am really pleased with. And as I said before; it is not my intention to publish every frame from this series here. Once again it is based on one of those 3D computer art images Angela Fox created for me inspired by INSTITUTIONALISED Volume 3. This one actually only uses the centre portion of one of those images, perhaps 25 - 30% of the whole. The idea is that it is the view through a sort of bulkhead-style (think bulkhead lamps or wall lights) porthole set in a steel door and guarded behind an out-curving cage of rusting steel bars. To the basic Angela Fox image I have added the bars of course (actually three sets superimposed), a hexagonal mosaic patterning effect to represent wire-reinforced glass, a lighting effect to help reinforce that 'glassy impression', an orangy colouring to the bars to give the impression of rust and age and no less than three layers of a fish-eye lens effect; all using the photo manipulation programme 'The Gimp'. As always; click on the pic to enlarge it. I hope you like it - let me know! By the way: I shall be in Camden Town this coming Wednesday if anyone fancies a pint or ten - I'll be in the 'Hawely Arms' in Hawley Crescent lunchtime around 1 PM and in the Camden Wetherspoons (strictly speaking a LLoyds No 1 Bar) 'The Ice Wharf' on the canal side before that... Cheers!
To set the scene: Long, rambling and rarely-trod corridors, twisting and turning - gaunt, forbidding and uninviting – have been negotiated. All have been of the same severe institutional flaking cream and green paint and lime wash, the same inky stencilled slogans repeated over and over on stark stone ceiling beams extolling the virtues of obedience, discipline and compliance; patients warned against talking, staff against laxity and complacency. The place is like a tangled interwoven tissue of locked and barred security grilles, blind, blocked-off passages and doors leading nowhere yet kept jealously locked anyway. On arrival the girl had been delivered to the very centre of this maze secured in a wheelchair with her eyes and ears covered - a self-contained spider web demiworld with no apparent way in or out. She is none the wiser now.
The Victorians built establishments such as this - ‘places of wholesome restraint’ as someone once said - incorporating these deliberately convoluted passageways to bamboozle would be absconders. She has just been informed there is such a multiplicity of possibilities that it is doubtful she has ever been taken by the same route twice. She has also just been informed how the place has been made even more cosy and snug since those Victorians abandoned ship so to speak, how the original stairwell had been discovered bricked up and filled in and how the establishment’s research foundation trust paid to install an elevator in a newly-dug service shaft in the 1960s to provide access – an elevator now sporting one of those numerically encoded keypads; very, VERY secure! As they arrive at their destination the nurse's last words are still ringing in her ears: “And talking of 'trusts' and trust funds... I seem to remember the doctor saying something about having received a document of some kind from your guardian. I believe it requires a signature – perhaps we can deal with that once we've ascertained the whereabouts of this 'diary' of yours.”