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Friday, June 26, 2009

Marisa Mell by Judith Eisler

The movie "Danger: Diabolik!" directed by Mario Bava with John Phillip Law as Diabolik and Marisa Mell as Lady Eva Kant has made quite an impression through the years on many creative people working in the movie business, even to this day! But it does not stop there! The movie also often had a lasting impact on other artists working in other areas of the arts like the visual arts! One of these visual art artists making a link between the movie and her work is Judith Eisler. Judith Eisler was born in 1962 in New York where she is still living and working. Eisler has a very uncommon way to create her paintings: she uses (cult) movies for her sources, pressing the pause button on the VCR, shooting the image with her digital camera, and then painting from the resultant photograph on the canvas. Eisler says of her paintings: "Each canvas is, in many ways, a fight between abstraction and representation." Her works typically have glossy surfaces and feature blurred often anonymous imagery. She has been compared to the German artist Gerhard Richter due to their similar working method. For her work, Judith Eisler received a BFA from Cornell University in 1984. In 2005, Judith Eisler painted this oil on canvas painting of one of the final scenes in the movie, where Marisa Mell as Eva Kant is mourning the lose of her partner Diabolik, hence the black fur and veil while tears are running from her cheek! Many fans of the movie regard this scene as one of the best and most beautiful shot scenes of the movie! So it is no wonder that the artist was attracted to this frame when deciding to make a painting of Marisa Mell! The painting is called "Marisa Mell 2"! It has the measurements of 48 by 60 inches (1.20 m x 1.54 m)! Special for this painting, knowing how the artist works, are the stretch marks on the painting resulting from the stretch marks on the VCR tape when the tape is worn out due the many viewings or the wear and tear of the VCR transmission heads. Nothing is known of the original asking price or where the picture is now!

2 comments:

Keith said...

So beautiful. I hope you had a nice weekend. Make sure you check out my post for Monday on my Sugar and Spice blog. You'll see why. :-)

Simon Rigot said...

In the John Philip Law comment on Diabolik DVD he tells about the adopted cat. She end up being adopted by Jane Fonda (starring JPL in Barbarella at the same time) brought up in Paris with Jane and Roger Vadim and died then in Paris.