Art Rec: Art of the Reasoner Paintings Series

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Title: Art of the Reasoner: Lime Green (Moriarty), Gold (John), Pastel Violet (Molly), Purple (Lestrade), Maroon (Sally), & Sepia (Irene)
Artist: NPCbot
Pairing: gen series of individual portraits
Rating: not rated, I would say G
Warnings: none
Verse: Sherlock BBC
Author's summary: (there is no summary for the whole series, but each portrait has interesting notes. Here are some excerpts from the artist that summarize what they are doing): I read this nice piece of Sherlock fanfiction (yes, they exist among the crap) the other day, called Art of the Reasoner. It's AU where Sherlock Holmes directs his massive intellect and observation skills into creating visual art instead of solving crimes. Among other things, in the fic Sherlock lists people into his phone as colours...I don't usually use reference pics but here I did, because the whole point of Artist!Sherlock is that he OBSERVES and never draws from imagination.

Reccer's comments: I love it when one work of fan creation inspires others, and this is a wonderful illustration of that. Fanfic author Tellytubby101 wrote an AU story, "Art of the Reasoner," in which Sherlock channeled his observational genius into art as a way of organizing and purging the constant inflow of information he saw around him (the fanfic was recc'd on this comm back in 2011, the rec is here). Having read and enjoyed the story, fanartist NPCbot was inspired to create paintings of most of the characters mentioned in the story in the style ascribed to Sherlock. This style combines realistic portraits, often centering on the face, with scribbled observations scrawled so thickly as to be largely illegible. Another detail of the story is that Sherlock organized his caller ID on his phone by assigning people colors rather than names, and the artist uses each character's address-book color as the dominant palette of their portrait.

The results are very interesting, and I personally find both Maroon (Sally) and Sepia (Irene) to be jaw-droppingly beautiful. Sally's portrait captures her smile and surrounds her with deep, warm color, while Irene's striking face stands out against a background of musical notes rather than words, and somehow the translucence of her throat suggests to me that Sherlock sees her, like himself, in terms of pure intellect and esoteric artistry. The Lime Green (Moriarty) portrait, on the other hand, is delightfully creepy and looks almost noir-ish to me, and the artist took the time to hand write every line by or about Moriarty in The Reichenbach Fall and scrawled them -- largely illegibly -- around the image.

This is a really interesting portrait series, and a tribute to the collaborative creativity of fandom :)