Alice in a bathroom
I'm a little obsessed with putting Alice in one picture with a male actor.
But in this case, I wonder if she's just going to be treated as a boring porn actress.
I'm working on a few more now, but it's quite difficult to bring out her unique charm in scenes like this.
It seems that Alice's attractiveness has obviously something different from the appeal of an ordinary porn actress.
Cypher's boudoir scene, entitled 'Be careful', serves as a cautionary reminder of the power that women wield in the bedroom. Alice is presented as a supremely confident female, wound up with sexual tension and baring her teeth like a tigress. The reclining male is at her service, excited by the prospect of being mauled, as he prepares to experience the impending thrills.
The composition is effective because of its simplicity. The male on the bed fills the foreground, whilst in the centre Alice approaches on all fours, attracted by the very response that she has inspired. She is framed by the curtains of the background, giving the impression of a theatre stage. The performance is about to begin.
Alexander Lobanov's portrait has proved to be popular with manip artists, and it has featured in an earlier picture by Cypher, entitled 'Rough and Mad Dentists'. The focus here is very much on the clenched teeth, in a dark and disturbing image of a painful extraction. In addition to the violence of the operation, the patient has been noosed, inexplicably and gripped by the throat. Again the composition locates Alice between the foreground component of the bloody tooth held in pliers, and the background window. Another male casually dons his shirt whilst looking towards the tooth. As viewers, we are invited to speculate about the nightmarish scene we are observing.
In the first of two bathroom scenes, Alice kneels submissively before another erection. She has been extracted from Peter Chupurov's picture, complete with her towel, which has been neatly trimmed to fit the manipulation. Her shoulder tattoo indicates that the image has been mirror-flipped, and Cypher has added leather cuffs to her wrists and ankles. The male's foot stands on the corner of the towel, which makes for a neat blending device, although his head is cropped out, and he is presented as an impersonal, faceless character. Whilst he demands attention, Alice is featured as the main subject of the picture.
In the second bathroom scene, Alice appears much more cheerful, and she no longer has the leather cuffs. This bold example of character interaction shows a sexually excited male placing his hand on her buttock as he leans over her. The second male standing on the left, providing the foreground component, is the same character who appears in 'Blackdreams' and 'Rough Looking Men'.
Alice has been mirror-flipped again, and the lighting has been balanced very successfully, considering that Valery Anzilov's source image was photographed in bright sunlight. The original photograph reveals a low viewpoint, with the feet very close to the camera. Cypher's use of lighting and colour balance creates the illusion of Alice crouching on the floor of the bathroom, in which the camera has a more elevated point of view. Short of making selective anatomical adjustments, the challenges presented by the relative figure proportions have been resolved to a large extent. Nice work, Cypher!
Inserting a whole figure into a new environment is frequently an ambitious undertaking, considering the need for consistency in viewing angles, relative proportions and distances - to say nothing of consistent lighting, shadows and colour saturation.
To date, I have only once attempted to place Alice in a bathroom, and she had to achieve three points of contact to appear convincing - seated on the rim of the bath, one foot on the floor and the other foot also on the rim. The pose, photographed by Vadim Rigin, makes sense if she is about to take a bath, so the running water and steam were added to give that impression. Manip artists will understand that various adjustments have to be made by trial and error, and quite often the resulting illusion of solid presence involves a degree of compromise.
The original caption states, 'For some reason, cleaning the numerous bathrooms has become one of the most popular tasks undertaken by the maids at Cruxton, and some of them have been known to spend many long hours engaged on this activity.'
The Bathroom at Cruxton Abbey
(Image hosted on DeviantArt Sta.sh. Full size picture - https://sta.sh/0gtsqsfv8lp )
(Image hosted on DeviantArt Sta.sh. Full size picture - https://sta.sh/0gtsqsfv8lp )