The RED QUEENpicturesImages, sketches and drawings by Jen Frankel The Red Queen is Snow White's worst nightmare. For one thing, I found her in our world, not Grimm's. She's a horrifying presence, a Medieval monarch who believes so much in her own divine rights that she kills for fun, sleeps with her brother (the only one she considers worthy) and takes on the Pope in Rome. And then, she loses her memory in a violent palace coup, and has the chance to start over, from an entirely blank slate. The question is, will she become a better person outside the palace, or will her nature out? RED QUEEN HEAD 1 - I walk ahead keening in the dark, you slightly behind in felicitous approval Gaimon is your pet. RED QUEEN HEAD 2 - Red Krannich! Will I bathe no more in your waters? I kiss the pool good-bye, painfully conscious of the silence of the fountains. RED QUEEN HEAD 3 - My brother stands by the Krannich his body is tense, his face serene like the red waters; what could he think? His eyes are exquisite. RED QUEEN HEAD 4 - Gaimon watches as I undress he should turn his back I know he is our only hope if he was not, he would be missing an eye now. RED QUEEN OLDER - Tomorrow my bastard on the throne I hid my jewelled head in a nun's hood; tomorrow my brother dead myself declared dead . RED QUEEN ENROBED - Tomorrow my brother strung up in public like curing ham I feel the place in my spleen where I carry his memory. RED QUEEN SCHEMING - Tomorrow as my legend and supposed body sink deeper into Krannich's red murk I crouch in my cowl, a serpent in the nursery. |
The 25 Imaginary Works series started off as a kind of a joke: to create a description of something that could never be achieved in actual media of any sort, but that would stimulate the imagination. Now they exist as twenty-five framed calligraphic treatments, digital versions of the same, and as post- and greeting cards. Eight have been made into short animated films. So twenty-five bits of impossibility have developed what you might call a life of their own, entirely outside the realm of the abstract and yet still without the potential (or at least the likelihood) to be rendered the way they themselves say they should be.