17" x 11", ink and digital, 2005
This was a play performed in the Alumni Theatre's New Ideas Festival a few years ago and was written by my girlfriend, Krista Dalby, who is an excellent playwright. More on her other plays later.
Fertility Rites is about a woman who feels her biological clock ticking and brings a couple of friends with her to a fertility clinic. The image of a nude woman in an "egg" surrounded/pressured by sperm came to me very quickly. I had numerous other poster ideas, but they were variations of other concepts; this image hadly varied in my sketching phase (see below).
The background is the nice pattern of an opera costume (from my costuming days).
17" x 14", ink, 2004, private collection
The play takes place in the waiting room of that clinic, so I thought it'd be fun to have the show "sponsored" by them. And, in case you're wondering, that is, indeed, a giant sperm serving to dot the "i" of the test tube...so with a little more sperm (to scale this time) at the bottom of the tube, and the sperm surrounding the woman in the main image, I make literal (metaphorically, in illustration) the Fairbanx Sperm Bank & Fertility Clinic's motto: "If you've got the glimmer, we've got the swimmer!"
The background is the nice pattern of an opera costume (from my costuming days).
17" x 14", ink, 2004, private collection
This is the preliminary sketch which was included in a package to raise some funds for the production.
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