This stylish image by Wally Rainbow mades an interesting prelude to the letter 'W' in my A-Z of Fetish Artists which is starting soon. The artist is a prolific producer of romantic cartoon art but this image is a bit more interesting than that. For a start the main character is quite a nice representative of manhood (a depiction which reflects the Italian background of the artist). There's also an obvious fetish element (domination and whipping) even if, like me, you're not interested in little blue men.
But this image has an additional appeal that is quite hard to define at first. The theme of a man carrying a demon on his shoulders who constantly punishes him has a distinguished and pretty much universal literary ancestry. Wikipaedia calls it the shoulder demon it pops up in Japanese legends and modern fantasy fiction where goblins abound. You don't have to be a psychologist to recognise the significance of the symbolism and it's relevance to personalities you know, the expression 'driven' seems most apt in this context.
Seeing the demon with a whip in his hand also makes me wonder if this offers an insight into the origins of our own interests in S&M, but it's a bit early in the day to explore this idea!
Wally Rainbow has a blog called Lightelf which covers other atists work as well as his own.
No comments:
Post a Comment