Title: That’s Not Me
Author: storyfan
Fandom: Downtown: A Street Tale
Character: Hunter
Fanart: Mixed media
Summary: Life and death are but a whisper apart.
Spoiler: The description behind the cut contains major spoilers. The art is placed first so you can avoid the description if you prefer.





“Downtown: A Street Tale” is an independent movie filmed in 2001. It features Chad Allen among an ensemble cast of teens and young 20s who live on the streets of New York City. “Hunter,” Chad’s character, is the estranged son of a wealthy family. He’s also a drug addict who drains the life out of the people who care about him, especially the young woman who will do anything for him.

Hunter is a complicated character, one whose layers are so thin that one bleeds through to the next. It’s hard, though, to separate Hunter from his addiction, and in the end we can’t do it. While that’s what I primarily wanted to show, I also wanted to leave a note of hope.

To start, I crackle-painted a sheet of watercolor paper using glue, a dark red artist’s acrylic and gold craft acrylic. The crackling reveals layers in the paint, right down to the paper. I took a screencap of the film that shows Hunter looking in the mirror of a public bathroom. For a brief moment, you can see the shock on his face as he regards his image, knowing somehow that he’s looking at the end of his own life but denying it all the same.

I changed the screencap to black and white, used one of Photobucket’s borders to confine the image, and then printed the image on vellum. I cut the image in two, reflecting Hunter’s final break with his life and reality, then secured the vellum to the painted background using pre-made photo corners and sticky dots. A chain with blood-red gems, fastened to the paper with needles, links Hunter with his addiction and his life on the streets.

To break away from my idea that all backgrounds must be square, I roughly tore the paper along the bottom and painted the white edge with black watercolor. I let a bit of it remain white to show the layers in the paper and to echo the layers of a complicated life.

The red faceted gems that fall from the picture represent the draining of Hunter’s life. I thought about leaving it at that, but after some thought I realized that everyone has the potential for good. Even the worst people, the ones who hurt others in terrible ways, were once babies, innocents of the world. So, I used one clear crystal gem to represent that innocence.

Depending upon whether you believe in an afterlife, the crystal gem also can represent the purity and good a creator sees in a damaged person’s soul. If you don’t believe that way, the crystal gem can represent the carbon that makes up much of the human body. Reduced to its elements, the human body in its crystallized form can do much to renew the earth and perhaps redeem a life many would consider wasted.


Cheerful topic, eh? :)