Robert Carrithers

Sabine Arminjon

I had the pleasure of meeting Sabine Arminjon in Paris last September. We had an enjoyable time together. Sabine is a very special artist. I love her work and talent. Her work reminds me somewhat of Jean Cocteau. Her paintings and drawings often include poetic writing. The colours that she uses makes me think of another time period in France. One of my favorite films is by Jean Cocteau called La Belle et la Bete/Beauty and the Beast. I have always been fascinated by the themes of duality. I like the way Cocteau explores the ideas of duality through the actor Jean Marais. This film and Cocteau´s life was interconnected in some ways as it is with most artists. Jean Marais plays both the beast and the handsome prince in the film. The duality is captured through Jean Marais´characters. The duality continues throughout the film with the sensations of light/darkness and beauty/beast along with love/lost and love/hate. I am also fascinated by how we view people who we love and then when the love sours, the image that you have of the person radically changes and you see that person in a completely light/darkness. This photo of Sabine was taken at the Centre Georges Pompidou. This photo carries on with the exploration of duality that I previously had been doing with the Bohemian Nude series. This photo is not a part of that series. I feel that I have gone much deeper into these sensations through this photo and I am quite pleased with it. A very special photo of a very special person. Click on all highlights above to get further information about the subjects.

Bohemian Nudes: Comtesse

Comtesse started with the second session of the Bohemian Nudes photo series. Please read about the history and explanation of the Bohemian Nudes series in the Rebeca photo below. I went to the Colours of Ostrava festival in Ostrava, Czech Republic last July. I went there to mainly see Iggy and the Stooges. (Comtesse´s favorite band. Mine too!) I had always wanted to photograph Iggy and the Stooges and I finally had the opportunity. I went through lots of trouble and managed to get a photo pass. I was under the stage and clicked away thinking I got the most amazing photos of Iggy and the band. I went out to celebrate afterwards. (little did I know, but later I found out, something was wrong with my camera and it all screwed up and most of my photos did not turn out at all. I did not know it at the time. I should have checked the camera as I was shooting away, but I was too carried away by the moment. When I found out a few days later I was destroyed. It was the curse of Iggy! Which I will have to explain when I have the nerve to post the surreal abstract images which I can say I did purposely to be artistic. To be continued at a later posting) Off I went to hit the bars with the help of the bad influence of Chris Hughes. I was kind of drunk when I saw the towering figure of a blond haired amazon. I struck up a conversation and mentioned about the photo series I was doing called Bohemian Nudes. To my surprise Comtesse agreed to do it. She lived in Pilzen and would make a point of coming to Prague to do a session.

Comtesse finally made it to Prague and we met with fellow Bohemian Nude Rebeca and went to a pub to talk. We did not manage to do the photo session that night. Comtesse managed to drink both of us under the table. The important thing was that we all bonded and that was the intention. We learned a lot about each other and what I remember is this: Comtesse as young as she is, is a master tattoo artist. She worked at her mother´s tattoo parlour in Pilzen, helping to run it and also to do tattooing. She never seems to get enough tattoos and I am sure when she is older she will have 100 tattoos on her. She was born on a rainy afternoon in 1990. She was twelve years old when she got her first tattoo and decided to be tattoo artist. She carries on with the spirit of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, mixed with a bit of doing fire shows. She loves to spit out fire. She draws comics, plays the bass and drinks absinthe. She is slowly creating  leopard patterns on her body. She is a model and generally living and learning life.

We finally did get together and do the photo session. We were originally going to go to abandoned buildings to take the photos, but we came across a mutual friend that had a projector with lots of colours to play with. Rebeca, Comtesse and I decided to take the idea of duality with various colours, light and dark to see where we could go with it. With the help of shared ideas between the three of us, we had a really productive session with satisfying results. This photo is one of them. There are more detailed photos with colours and nudity, but I thought it best to show this photo of Comtesse and Rebeca´s photo below here on the site and to have the more explicit photos specifically for gallery shows and for those that are truly interested in the collection. I am doing it this way, first out of respect for the models Comtesse and Rebeca, for their work and images, also the photos are very special and not to be broadcast all over the place. The photos would lose their magic for me, if that makes sense. I hope that it does. I like this photo. In some ways it reminds me of a painting with a bit of Bohemian magic. Comtesse is now working with her mother in Liverpool. Her mother has a new tattoo parlour there. Comtesse plans to travel the world and experience life to the fullest as soon as she can.

Bohemian Nudes: Rebeca

Last June I put out a casting notice for a photo series I was doing called Bohemian Nudes. It all happened because I was doing some film work in Vienna and I went to an exhibit of Egon Schiele at the Leopold Museum. I loved his work and was very inspired. I started to study his work. I learned that he had a strong connection with the Czech Republic. His mother was from Český Krumlov. He went to her abandoned house to escape Vienna and to retreat with his muse Wally. Egon was very content to paint and live a quiet life with Wally. They managed to live a peaceful existence there for awhile until he was accused of painting pornographic images by the outraged locals. He was swiftly thrown in prison and put on trial. He was found guilty of course. When Egon and Wally had a peaceful quiet life to themselves, Egon was quite prolific and accumulated a large collection of some of his best work. The police confiscated all of the paintings. After being found guilty, Egon was led to the town square where the public servants stacked the paintings in a huge pile, threw petrol on them and lit them on fire to the cheers of the crowd. Egon Schiele was led away to prison and stayed there another month. After he was released he went back to Wally and life in Vienna, never to step foot in the Czech lands again. The town of Český Krumlov now has a museum dedicated to Egon Schiele. It is 100 years later and I felt the need to do something in his honour. I was strongly influenced by Egon Schiele´s work and wanted to do a series of photos inspired by his paintings and drawings. I wanted to explore these ideas and see where all this would take me.

I never worked in this style before. I have mostly concentrated on doing portraits of people who inspire me in some way because of their creativity and uniqueness. First I had to find a suitable muse to work with to make this work. I decided that this would be a creative process where the model and photographer would inspire each other as equals. All of this led me to Rebeca Pla. I put out the word along with casting notices. Rebeca showed up at the casting and I was quite surprised. She was an image of extreme asymmetrics. She had long hair on one side of her head and on the other her head was shaved. After speaking to her, I found out that one side of her body had hair on it, arms, pubic and legs. On the other side, the left if I am not mistaken, she was all shaved. She told me that she was originally from Spain in the Catalonia region. Several years before, she was somewhat conservative and started working for a company in Dublin. Burned out from too much work, overnight, she decided to throw off the shackles of the work ethic, moved to Edinburgh, Scotland and got involved in the arts. Her specialty was nudity. She was a live model for artists and photographers. She appeared in the Edinburgh Fringe theatre hit Nic Green´s"Trilogy", where over fifty naked women of all ages and sizes, danced and performed for three hours. She continued with her own art and performance. She was attracted to the mysticism of Prague and ended up here. It was only natural that we would meet and do a project like this. If I was going to explore these ideas of Egon Schiele with anyone, it had to be with her. So we ventured forth throughout the summer doing a series of photo sessions and produced amazing results.

Looking at this photo you might ask, "Where is the nudity and what the hell does this have to do with Egon Schiele?"

Yes, I asked myself the same thing in fact and I answered myself, " Well it is all a journey and one never knows where one is going to end up, so we might as well make the most of it!"

Actually there are a lot of nude portraits that we did with a strong Egon Schiele influence and we are both quite satisfied with the results. I do not intend to show these here on the website. I feel that I have to give these photos the respect that they deserve. I will only exhibit them in gallery shows or show them to those interested upon request. The two photos that I show here came out of a long extended session where we explored the ideas of duality with colours/light/darkness, emotions of sadness/happiness, life/loss and much more. This photo looks as if it has the sensation of disco lights, psychedelia, drugs,and actually it is not that at all. If you look at Rebeca´s eye, well, it speaks for it itself. You tell me.Click on any highlighted names above to be led to sites for further information.