TraceyMeagher.com

Every now and again I take some time out from html, css, php and all the webby stuff to get creative. I’d love to be able to give more time to photomanipulation but for now I have to make do with a few days here and there. I did this image a few months back. I called it Isobel just because I was too lazy having finished it to come with anything more original. She does look a like an Isobel, I think.  I purposefully distressed the image to give it an old canvas type feel and it’s turned out kind of Vermeer-ish, which was entirely accidental but I like it.  I definitely had lots of fun with this image and I guess it took about 2 days working at on and off to complete. I think the biggest challenge was her hair.  Here you can see the original photo I worked with.  This girl has amazing eyes!

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I saw the movie Revolutionary Road before I read the book. The movie captivated me. I was instantly drawn to the characters and their plight to wrestle from the mundane routine of eveyday living, their amazing selves. Immediately after seeing the film, I bought the book.

Of course, as is very often the case, the book gives a far richer, fuller understanding of the characters and plot but I loved both the movie and the film. Hearing Winslet and DiCaprio in the lines of the book didn’t ruin it for me at all. In fact, the film remained remarkably faithful to the movie and reading the book after having seen the film was like having access to Frank and April’s therapists notes (if they had had one!).

On the surface Revolutionary Road appears to be a critique of the uninspiring 50′s suburban lifestyle that helps fracture the marriage of Frank and April Wheeler and while that is the backdrop for the story, the real point of the book is made clear in the first chapter.

When the book opens, we see Frank and April Wheeler struggling to come to terms with a failed stage production of  ”The Petrified Forest”. We know from the first chapter …  from the opening lines, that this is not going to be a story with a happy ending.

“The final dying sounds of their dress rehearsal left the Laurel Players with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the footlights of an empty auditorium.”

For most of the book, Frank and April do appear silent and helpless in the knowledge that they are not putting in an extraordinary performance.  Despite their awareness of the  absurdity of   “deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs” , they haven’t done anything that would warrant applause, nothing remarkable, nothing that marks them as exceptional.

The hope and anticipation at the beginning of the book for the play is peppered with fears and insecurities that are muted through a collective belief that the players eagerness would really make it happen.   Coping with the humiliation of not being able to make it happen is the theme for the entire story.

Revolutionary Road is about April’s attempt to cope with the fact that, like the play, her life has no creative merit.   She is a woman who sees the potential to be extraordinary and yet comes to recognize that through circumstance or just plain bad decisions,  she has abdicated her freedom to creatively make the choices that will elevate her beyond the banal suburban life she lives.

April Wheeler has not managed to put in a performance in her own life that would warrant applause. She has fallen victim to “the great sentimental lie of the suburbs”.   When she does finally make the decision to break from the “soap-opera” picture of herself and plans to take her family to Paris, her efforts are thwarted relentlessly until she becomes despondent and arguably unstable.

In the book, Frank Wheeler quickly become a far more sympathetic character. This takes some time in the movie. In many ways, he is a far simpler character. His desire to be loved is stronger and more grounding than Aprils. Reading the book, you get the impression that Frank could have subscribed to the surburban lifestyle without anywhere near as much angst as April.  But April’s desire to break out awakens  his ego.  His college friends once remarked, “.. old Wheeler really had it. All he would ever need, was the time and freedom to find himself “, which would probably require “his early and permanent withdrawal to Europe”.

April uses Frank’s ego to leverage the exciting life she longs for.  Ultimately, circumstances come into play that shatter the dream.  Unlike the play, April cannot write off her failed life with glib remarks about how it was all just fun.  Her sense of frustration turns to anger which in turn, manifests as  a sense of desperation that drives her to do anything to make her dreams comes true.

The movies is beautifully filmed and captures the claustrophobic sense of the Wheeler’s 1950′s suburban American life.  Winslet and DiCaprio are brilliant together and deliver the dialogue,  the tensions and all the nuances of the characters with natural ease.  Yates’ dialogue is so non-contrived and utterly convincing. Both the film and book resonate to the heart the sense of  hurt, frustration and ultimately defeat, the characters feel, which is immediately poignant to all of us still waiting for unfulfilled dreams to come true.

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Spent some time this morning working on a robot ‘plate’ effect in photoshop. Not totally happy with how it turned out on the face but the body is pretty ok. This is again for a tutorial I’m writing!  Will post the link soon.

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On our first trip to Argentina, we met a man called Dan Greene. I remember him clearly, a huge bulk of a man with grey hair, wrapped up warm in a dark coat and scarf. Anthony and I were walking on a busy shopping street in short sleeves and open toe shoes in the middle of August (the Argentinian winter!!). Being used to the cold Irish weather the Argentinian winter was just an average day in our summer … nothing to get wrapped up for! We heard somebody call out, “Aren’t you cold?” and when we turned around Dan Greene was shouting at us from a short distance, while gesturing at his coat. He soon approached and the conversation started. Yes, Dan Greene was Argentinian Irish and so we were practically family! He told us all about his leather import business, gave us a business card and invited us to call him if we ever returned!

Dan is what we loved about the Argentinian people, genuine and warm people. What I remember most about Dan is what he told us about Che. Perhaps Alberto Korda’s Guerrillero Heroico was peering at us from some T-shirt stand or maybe Dan always talked to tourists about Che! Che, Dan explained was not Guevara’s name but a term of affection, particular to Argentinians, used to call the attention of a pal, like hey buddy!. Che used this expression so much it became the name Cubans, and later the world, knew him by.

Guerrillero Heroico – The Most Famous Photo In The World

What was obvious was that Dan Greene had a great admiration for Che Guevara. And rightly so! Che is the ultimate symbol of self-sacrifice. A medical doctor and intellectual, a poet who had a passion for all subjects from engineering to literature to archaeology, Che could have lived the life most Argentinian men dreamed of at the time. Instead he chose the revolutionary path, deeply troubled by the inequalities he saw in his beloved South America. He validated the moral, ethical and even aesthetic reasons for “La Revolution” in a way that Fidel Castro could never have achieved. Castro, though politically astute, lacked Che’s natural charismatic presence. I imagine Castro hated Che for this, since Castro despised politicians wanting instead to be seen as a man for the people!

The great tragedy of Che Guevara’s life was that he died ultimately betrayed by the people he was trying to liberate. Che had a vision that the whole of South America would be liberated from the inequalities of Capitalism, headed by the US. This brought him to the jungle in Bolivia, where he was captured by CIA backed Bolivian Special Forces and later executed. When asked before his death if he was thinking of his immortality, he answered “No, I’m thinking about the immortality of the revolution.” When a half drunken and cowardly Sergeant Terán hesitated on shooting Che (most likely because of pressure to make sure the bullets looked like battle wounds rather than execution shots), Che Guevara told him

“I know you’ve come to kill me. Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man!”

Che Guevara lived this life of humility without question. He was a man who claimed that a true revolutionary is driven by love, love for his country, the people in it, love for freedom. Che loved. He was heart broken by the poverty he saw. Even as a doctor, before his association with Cuba, Castro and the Revolution, he suffered for the deprivation he witnessed while treating the poorest of the poor. At one point, he became obsessed with an elderly washer-woman who symbolised for him everything that was wrong in South America. He later wrote a poem which he dedicated to her.  She was everything he fought for.

Perhaps one other thing that makes Che Guevara particularly interesting to me is his Irish roots! It’s not so well known that many people left Ireland for South America, taking advantages of opportunities that came with the vast amount of land there. Dan Greene’s ancestors may have been among them but Che’s Guevara’s were too. Che’s father Ernesto Guevara Lynch was of Irish descent. On speaking about his son’s restlessness he said in an 1969 interview (2 years after Che was murdered)

“The first thing to note is that in my son’s veins flowed the blood of the Irish rebels.”

Che's father in the centre with Che on the far left. There's no mistaking the Irish head on Ernesto Senior!

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It’s been an age since I used Photoshop for anything creative (I’m afraid making web menus and gradient backgrounds doesn’t count!) so I took some time today to refresh whatever skills I had and created this image. I don’t know how to describe it really. It’s fantasy so anything goes, right?

I’ll be posting a tutorial on how to create this image on a site I’m developing soon so I’ll post the link when it’s up and running!

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