Textual Poaching

This assignment was rather confusing for me.  At first, I really didn’t know how I should identify myself.  I thought of myself as an American, a libertarian, a man,  a Californian, and a few other ideas that I just didn’t feel were very apt at describing me.  I finally got my inspiration for this project when I was drying my hair one morning.  I now had a starting point.  Even so, I wasn’t really sure what to do with this as my identity.  I have red hair.  So what?  

One night I was watching Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and I noticed something about one of the main characters.  Ron Weasley is always the joke.  It’s funny to see him puke up slugs and have a broken wand.  He gets into these laughable situations because of his short fuse.  More recently, Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel depicts Clark Kent’s mean childhood bully as a redhead who grows up to be a dorky and rather unattractive worker at IHOP.  Both of these examples show redheads as hotheaded, quick-tempered, tools used for comic relief.  This use of redheads as jokes has been catching on a lot more in recent years but the short fuse of redheads has been a long standing stereotype. In Anne of Green Gables,  the redheaded protagonist is described as “having a temper to match her hair.” and in Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield says “People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily.”

To accomplish this project I knew I wanted to take a painting or picture of a famous redhead and alter it similar to the examples of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Queen.  One of the first people to come to mind was Van Gogh.  I thought it was pretty well known that he was a redhead but just in case I decided to take his self portrait and bump up the gingerness a little.  After I had my original image, I had to think of a way to show Van Gogh, a rather serious and melancholy person, in a more silly, comical light  Using Photoshop I was able to give Van Gogh a pair of Groucho Marx gag glasses to represent the silly joke that redheads have become in the media.  To represent the ill-tempered stereotype, I reddened the face a bit, scrunched the brows down and put a little bit of smoke coming from the ears, also working as a comic effect. 

It is interesting that media has shown redheads this way when I have never identified myself the same.  I’ve never been someone who gets mad very quickly and when I do get mad, it is often quelled pretty quickly.  I don’t see myself as the silly one to laugh at though I do tend to make people laugh a lot.  The way redheads are portrayed in the media is just not very accurate.  It seems that most have an average temper and I don’t think we like being the tail end of every joke.  Van Gogh’s self portrait is just him.  Nothing very evocative or crazy about the portrait and that is how I think of myself.  Nothing too weird or silly about me.  Just another person with red hair.