Artistic Use
Some artists such as poets derive insight and inspiration from abandoned footwear - a form of art known as objet trouvé. The fisherman hauling up an old boot, rather than a fish, is a comic-strip cliché. In Cinderella, the lost slipper is a classic example of the literary device of the "lost object".
The theme of abandoned footwear and their untold story is explored in detail in the novel, Jen-Zen and the One Shoe Diaries by author Julie Ann Shapiro. In the novel, her character describes the phenomenon, “The forgotten shoes are everywhere: littering the side of the highway, floating in the tide, going upstream with the Salmon, or occupying a field like a dead body,discarded and left to rot.” The novelist described the backstory of her novel, which offers much insight about the abandoned footwear from an art, societal and philosophical perspective.
| “ | In Southern California I noticed flip flops and running shoes left behind on the beach, the freeways, construction sites and parking lots and felt this uncanny urge propelling me to write about them. I couldn’t escape them, nor the unshakable sadness and loss I felt emanating from the shoes themselves. Why singular shoes I kept asking myself? Is it a Cinderella complex? Is this a poem I should write or a short story? I wrote them all and then one pivotal day I remembered a time as a teenager when my friends and I played with a Ouija board and a shoe moved by itself. It was this big aha moment! | ” |
The author noted that, "... real life photographer, Randall Louis Hamilton contacted me and mentioned having a shoe photo collection, proving that life sometimes is stranger than fiction." The two artists have since collaborated on their coincidental works.
Read more about this topic: Abandoned Footwear
Famous quotes containing the word artistic:
“I think “taste” is a social concept and not an artistic one. I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else’s living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another’s brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)
“He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)