Dangers Untold and Hardships Unnumbered

I’d planned to post this blog another time but then we lost David Bowie and the title couldn’t be changed- it was too perfect. This is probably the worst time to admit I hate the song Space Oddity, but I did love Labyrinth even though I didn’t actually see it until I was eighteen. I watched it in a friend’s paint-splattered mystical box-room in art school halls of residence, where I was sleeping to avoid hearing the Bedspring Symphony next to my own room.
Why didn’t Sarah just leave the wailing baby and stay in Faerieland with Bowie??  (And could we have him back please, Death? We’ll give you Donald Trump…)

Anyway… I was in London a few days ago and I saw this genius advert for the Tate Britain.

What a way to advertise an art gallery- no actual art, but an intriguing backstory. So much for a picture being worth a thousand words! Then I realised I not only knew the picture but had posed for an interpretation of another of Bacon’s Triptychs! I just didn’t know what they were about.
Here’s the one in the advert:

And here’s the one I posed for, with the result underneath. The painter is Nelson Aquini.

I found the original pictures creepy (that’s not a bad thing) but didn’t like or dislike them. Looking again and knowing what inspired them… I wouldn’t hang any on the wall but can appreciate the achievement as art: Bacon managed to paint what being consumed by horror and screaming grief feels like. Now, if only I could do that with words! 😉

Another piece of art I like because of its backstory is “Rock Drill”, by Jacob Epstein, and it used to look like the picture on the right. It had begun as a celebration of the industrial age… and then the First World War happened. Epstein ripped the sculpture apart and worked in a more classical way from then on!

I started thinking about some of my favourite pictures and the effort, pain and strange stories behind some of them. There are some I’ve blogged about before (check out “Death Becomes Her“, “Welcome to Rivendell” and “Adventures After Dark“) but of those remaining, these are probably my top three:

1) Girl on the Moon (photos by Calvato)

Calvato had warned me that this spectacular several-storey gutted warehouse was full of dust. Not a problem at all- I had fun pretending to be an astronaut stomping in slow-motion sending up clouds around me (nobody ever said I was cool, okay?)… BUT as I was coming down with the flu, I was feeling like the lovechild of Gollum and a wet blanket. Yes, I wanted the desolate hunched-over look here but I’m not usually a fan of method-acting! I absolutely love the pictures even though I was bedridden, shootless and delirious for the next three days. I then realised an hour before my coach left for Berlin that I couldn’t find my keys. Cue lurching to the train station with a bad drawing and a “have these been handed in?” sentence courtesy of google translate.
MIRACLE: They were in the station and I got my coach. 😛

2) Face-Off (photographer is Chicproduction)

This photo is from one of my first ever photoshoots!! I was nervous and my face was a little sore from a make-up artist’s insistent scrubbing at me the day before. When the (different, nonviolent) make-up artist for this shoot touched my face with her brush, my cheeks swelled up like a hamster’s!! Being new to modelling, this was the most catastrophic thing that had ever happened to me at a shoot. After a pep-talk from the very understanding photographer, we carried on and got THIS! Looking again, there is some Bowie in there, I swear… 😀 (and I learned not to let people scrub at my face.)

3) Miranda. (Photographer is Magpie Tommy, designer is Orchid Corsetry)
I’ll blog the whole set soon…

I’m going to tell you the whole story in another blog but it entailed a 5am start, an army-style crawl through the bushes, two ticks, some broken French and the threat of capture. 😉

Other times of course, shoots go as smoothly as possible, even outdoors in the cold. I was amazed that photographer Digital Caress had not only a Plan A, but B and C too when I worked with him during a trip to Holland. Plan A (a wildlife sanctuary and ruin) worked just fine though!
As usual, a story came into my head (another to add to the archive of plots) as soon as I picked the final shots to post here: A story about a person who had hidden from the end of the world. On emerging from the space she’d lived in, she found everything was dead and at a loss what to do, turned her back on the cold deadness around her and made the ruins beautiful in her own way until she felt the sun on the stones. Turning around, she saw one tree still in green and made her way to it, farewelling the rest of the world. She’d stay there, unmoving until something grew again…

As my ‘flash fiction’ blogs tend to be very popular with you all, I’m writing some more. Stay tuned for mini-tales to accompany some of my pictures… 😉

For now though, it’s 1am here in England and my hot water bottle calls!

Goodnight!

ROSWELL xxx

The Dimholt Road

“The way is shut. It was made by those who are dead, and the dead keep it.”
JRR Tolkien (Lord of the Rings)

That sentence got into my head the same way songs do when I shot with Amelia Roslyn and Sam (aka Sjambok) in this ancient Roman ironworks which looked exactly like somewhere in Middle Earth. 😀

 

My pictures don’t really do justice to the scale of the place, which was huge! In fact; for various reasons I need to get myself a ‘proper’ camera, as my phone really isn’t the greatest and I have certain exciting plans involving my own camera…

Anyway, there’s a beautiful expression in (I think) Mexico: “el bosque del corazon” (the forest of the heart), which refers to your spiritual home, rather than the place in which you live. Well, English woodland and forest is mine, so I was very excited when we arrived here- not to mention awestruck, as the light was shining in perfect fairytale shafts through the leaves and down to the mossy boulders I started posing on.

Photo by Sjambok

Look at the dark looming trees behind me too!! ❤

We’d spoken beforehand about the ‘mood’ we wanted from the pictures. Art-nude is often a very dreamy, ethereal genre but this time I wanted something different. There are so many legends about what happens to young wayward men who see faeries and dryads in the woods. Mostly, they’re never seen again- or turned into something four-legged.
So… I wanted the pictures to look as though they were taken *just* before the action happens. As though I know the watcher is there and I’m just deciding what to do about them…

Photos by Amelia

These were smoke grenades (below) as sadly we couldn’t capture the very real strands of mist just above the forest floor!

“Legends can be now and forever, loved by the sun…”

The photo above might have been taken just after I burst out laughing at a Lord of the Rings similarity (I promise my next blog will have NO Tolkien references.)
We were halfway up a very steep boulder here- there was Amelia being Frodo, with the most important thing (the camera) hanging around her neck, Sam managing the lights and extra equipment, often leading the way (snd already a Sam) … and then there was me, naked and covered with bits of moss crawling up rocks after them. “My precioussssss!” 😛

After a cookie break we moved on to some beautiful, slightly creepy cave entrances for a bit of bondage, which I was very excited to shoot. Although I’m known as a fetish and bondage model, I am actually very selective about who I shoot ropework with as it can be dangerous.

Often our mythical dryad creatures are bound to one cave or tree… so here I am. 🙂

We drove back to my hotel in the beautiful not-quite-sunset. That little dot you can see in the lower middle is the moon!

Obviously, it’s Winter now and far too cold generally to pose nude outdoors but I am available for bookings from late January onwards. Now, I’m on holiday for the next few weeks and planning to get all crafty with making things, and doing a LOT of writing as I have missed doing articles! I haven’t properly decorated the boat yet but I’ll be getting some seriously tacky tinsel in and may even make a Christmas tree fairy. 😉
As a pagan, my Winter celebration is Yule aka the Solstice, which is on the 21st. However, I grew up with Christmas, am more than happy to be told Merry Christmas and I celebrate that with my mum too. Yay for festival sharing… and yule logs.

I have a lot of seasonal festive blogs to share with you soon but right now there is a silver flowery accessory that needs to be steampunked up. 😛

Take care everyone, speak soon,

ROSWELL xxx

p.s. Outtake time! This will be my face when I can pose in the forest again! 😛
The watermark was on all the raw photos so I didn’t accidentally post unedited ones but I do have permission to post these two.

Sam is taking this lighting test very seriously… 😛 

Springing sundial

So I’m back on the Mothership and catsitting now I’ve returned from a mini tour, and what a fantastic week it has been! 😀

– I went to visit a friend’s new home, full of curiosity cabinets, tea, skulls and wood/glass sculptures… and stroked a chinchilla for the first time. They’re strange little things- like living marshmallows!
– I did a photoshoot in a tranquil, friendly yoga studio, with yet more tea and artwork everywhere. On the pinboard was the yoga students ‘weekly thought’ and interestingly it was something I needed to read:
Aparigraha: Greed rooted in jealousy. For example, wanting more than you need just because someone else has it. I’m proud to have very successful friends and of course I’m happy for them, but often evaluate my own accomplishments as not being enough, so it was nice to see a reminder that this is a thought pattern I need to let go of.

– I met a couple of friends I’ve spoken to online regularly but never actually met in person! It’s always a bit nerve-wracking but we got on like houses on fire and I hung out with a gigantic dog too. 😀
If you have a sense of humour, do check out my friend’s creative endeavour: The Beezly Street Gazette. It’s a Daily Mash-esque satire and really very funny.
– I attended an engagement party for my beautiful Kitty Wood Photography and “Beardy Stu”… and I’m now a bridesmaid for the first time! During that weekend, I became a mermaid, dressed like an 80s rockstar, ate my bodyweight in sausage rolls, lost a French Fry crisp between my boobs and got the hideously early coach back home then flopped into bed. Congratulations to the happy couple! 😀
Here I am with the bride- who has a great blog HERE:

– I nipped up to Manchester for a quick shoot (the hostel made me feel very at home- on a riverside with Canada geese and boats) and arrived back to a very cuddly, very clingy Mog.

Today’s been a day of chilling and though I will be answering emails etc over the next week, I’ll be a little slow as I’m enjoying some much needed downtime. Hope you understand. 🙂

In my last blog, I hoped that the preview would work and bring some Spring warmth… and it’s worked! There are snowdrops everywhere, daffodils are peeking out above the earth, catkins hanging on the trees and though it’s still chilly on the boat, I’m not as deathly freezing as I was and my hot water bottle is sulking redundantly in the corner. I even went for a long riverside walk and had a ‘singing’ conversation with a robin.
So here are some more pictures from the awesome Follyhouse team, who I’m planning my next shoot with. Hooray!

Autumn…

Winter…

Spring…

Summer…

I didn’t notice the seasonal parallels until I started uploading them here!

A few more:

For the latex and heavy rubber people, why not check out Marquis Magazine on the 25th? There’s a feature and several pages of yours truly wearing the shiniest of latex. I’m so, so excited to show you those pictures (and my new shoes). 😉

Now, I’m going to have a Zen-stretching session in front of the fire I just made . I shot with Sense8 Photography the other day and for the first time on camera, achieved this!!! (In yoga, it’s called the Compass or Sundial pose). I cannot wait to shoot this pose in latex and may have the chance at Dominatrix Weekend next month, where I’m stomping the catwalk again!

Speak to you in five days! 😉

ROSWELL xxx

p.s. behind the scenes in my own shoes:

Another magical forest

I never get fed up of shooting in forests- every few weeks, I get an entirely new backdrop to interact with and new plants and creatures to look for- especially when I’m shooting outside of the UK.
Last time I visited the Netherlands, I found wild boar, red squirrels, nuthatches (I think) and deer. I also discovered Dutch pancakes. Not a creature, I know, but still seriously amazing. 😉

I got these pictures from Frits aka Studio3nl a little while ago but didn’t have the chance to post them up! So here you go- it was a beautiful day, if a little muddy. Though we tried hard to be discreet, we did nearly cause a man to fall off his bicycle, which made me nearly fall off the tree stump I was posing on!! Utterly hilarious- it was a multi-quadruple-take, as he kept swinging back off his seat just to check I wasn’t a figment of his imagination, LOL!!

Wish me luck- I’m about to head South (hopefully ahead of the snow) for some outdoor nudes… though hopefully my “Narnia coat” will get another outing too… 😉

Got to dash!

ROSWELL xxx