This is Not to be Bourne
One of the best scenes in Pride and Prejudice is Lady Catherine de Bourgh's smack down of Lizzy that doesn't quite go to plan. She had intended for Lizzy to meekly agree to all her demands with regards to her nephew, therefore it is quite a shock when Lizzy doesn't play ball. Yes, Darcy's declaration of love might be the most loved, and the opening line the most quoted, but to me, NOTHING beats this scene. What Lady Catherine says flows off Lizzy like water off a duck's back and this makes her incensed, crying out "This is Not to be Bourne!" Lady Catherine can not believe her words are insignificant to Lizzy, yet they are, which lead to how I handled the treatment of this piece. I used the same paper stock as I did for my first piece in this series, "Every Savage Can Dance." Yet I reversed the treatment of the figures. In "Every Savage Can Dance" I used pencil over a ground of gesso. This lead to the figures popping out of the background and having definition with the line work on top. Here I didn't want the figures to pop. I wanted them kind of ghosted, to show that Lady Catherine's words will not impact Lizzy's decisions one bit. Therefore I laid down the pencil first and laid the gesso over it, obscuring the lines. Lady Catherine might think she has impact, but she has left no impression at all. While I admit that this piece might not be the most dramatic that I made in this series, I do think that it went exactly to plan with getting the meaning across. So shall I call it a success?
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