Inspiring Illustrations; I Search for a Paula Meadows Pic and Find a Source of Fine Bondage

Hi folks

I've at last again been visited by my muse, after an extended period of lacklustre drive during which my writing pretty much stagnated for while INSTITUTIONALISED volume 2 is coming along apace. I have to transcribe onto the computer the stuff I wrote while out yesterday but I have so many new ideas buzzing around inside my head at the moment that I can't wait to again put pen to paper. What this all means is that I am fairly loath to interrupt the creative process while all is going so well so as far the blog is concerned, for while I'm going to restrict myself to updating links to various picture resources. Although this does mean of course that I will have to take time out to search the net I can do so in very short bursts, particularly as I've yet to fully trawl through the Russian website I reported earlier. But having said all that, part of what has reinvigorated my writing is having revisited the work of some of those great artists out there many of which were responsible in one way or another for inspiring to write in the first place; you know the sort of thing, you see a picture or a series of pictures and wonder…what is going on there, really? What is really been said?

In terms of the crystallisation of the ideas that eventually became INSTITUTIONALISED volume 1, at least in so far as the institutional scenarios depicted, one of the most informative works for me was an illustration by the great Paula Meadows, as was, that I had in my collection as a scan but have somehow mislaid. Basically it involve a young girl being punished in a very sparsely furnished, spot-lit and very institutional looking chamber - one just knew by looking at it that even after the miscreant is finally removed from that very secure-looking room she will be no less under lock and key. There is no ‘outside’ here for her, just layers of security nested matryoshka*-like. Unseen, but written into the atmosphere of the picture, as least as far as I was concerned, the feeling that here was a secure chamber residing within a high security area, itself residing within some high walled secure institution… it's all in that feeling of hopelessness again.

Anyway, thinking back to that image has got the creative juices working again and since I feel I have to dredge up some artwork links any way, I am hoping to rediscover the aforementioned illustration on one of my, necessarily short, exploratory expeditions… be assured that you will see it here just as soon as I can get my hands on it.

Meanwhile I've come across in a source of bondage images should bondage be your thing as it is mine, albeit not as an end in itself. I'm not really a bondage fetishist per se, you see; all those complicated arrangements of ropes, chains and things, taken in isolation, do little for me.

.....

For me there has to be some story to it, there has to be some purpose; it might be that it has become necessary to secure a young lady for her caning. Then again perhaps she is in diapers; there is a first time for everything and what better way can there be to get a young lady over this personal barrier. None of this is to deny, of course, that there is a place for bondage as a punishment in itself… perhaps the miscreant, detained in a secure ward in any case, has earned herself a few days restricted to her hospital bed, lying in silence in nice comfortable padded medical restraints, the heavy white curtain kept drawn around 24 hours a day.

.....

You see, to me bondage is something I equate more with an institutional environment; it seems more plausible there and to me plausibility is everything. It rarely works for me if depicted in a domestic situation, although under certain circumstances it might be plausible for a set of medical (humane) restraints to be seen fitted to a bed - but even then I would imagine it to be a hospital style bed brought in for the purpose and kept in a room suitably adapted and decorated, perhaps then the miscreant, if money is no object, even benefiting from having her own live-in nurse to minister to her care. Anyway, I've chosen an image that works for me from the aforementioned site... as usual just click on the picture to link to it and check out what they've got (and it is quite a lot - around 120 pages I think; blimey O'Reilly!!!).