Love it Like the Toad
I plucked the idea from Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey for this lithograph print after reading it through a feminist lens for a class I took while in college. While skimming through the book for ideas, I found my catalyst on the first two pages of the chapter, “Confessions.” Through the character Agnes, Brontë expresses the idea that while beauty isn’t the most important quality about a person, it does significantly impact one’s life with either the abundance of it or lack thereof. One quote in this section that embodies this idea is: “A little girl loves her bird – why? Because it lives and feels; because it is helpless and harmless. A toad, likewise, lives and feels, and is equally helpless and harmless, but though she would not hurt a toad, she cannot love it like the bird, with its graceful form, soft feathers, and bright, speaking eyes.”
I wanted to turn the idea on its head. The message I wanted to communicate instead was that it isn’t hopeless to believe one’s lack of perceived physical beauty won’t always inherently overshadow the interior self. Using this specific quote, I thought about how I could achieve this goal visually. I decided to put the toad front and center to showcase her importance. To further accomplish this task, I made her a queen with her scepter seated on a tree stump throne inspired by a tree stump ‘chair’ of sorts made for my sister and I in my grandparent’s backyard. To include the birds, I gave them the role of the toad’s assistants, holding up their queen’s cape lest it touch the ground.
Although this is a lithograph print, I also introduced watercolors. I initially worked with polyplates and not stones, and through trial and error, I found sharpie markers and a mixture of India ink and floor polish gave me the results I wanted. In this artwork, I only drew with sharpie markers, and therefore, the image I created contains heavy line work and contours. I introduced the watercolor as an afterthought on one of the prints that did not turn out well and ended up loving what it did to emphasize and give life to the image.