catcher

catcher
Originally uploaded by claud-hop

Pulling an artist statement out of your butt 25 minutes before you have to hand in and talk about a print is a skill all on its own...

Image and Text

For this image, I wanted to recreate a fragment of the dream-like vision that Holden Caulfield describes to his little sister, Phoebe, in the novel The Catcher In The Rye. His vision spawns from his misinterpretation of the Robert Burns poem Comin’ Through The Rye, in which one of the lines reads “If a body meet a body”; whereas he believes the line to be “If a body catch a body”. He tells his sister that he sees himself standing in this big field of rye, and his job is to find the children that are inexplicably playing in it, and catch them, should they fall. The image displays a soft colour palate, which I intentionally chose in order to keep with the dreamy tone of Holden’s vision. The way the words above his head are displayed are meant to suggest the feeling of falling, representing the falling children in his vision, as well as Holden’s own declining mental health, which is described by him throughout the novel.