In our last Kick-About, Alexander Calder’s Goldfish Bowl prompted responses to a small, self-contained world of wire, movement, and suspended forms. This week, we turn one eye to Odilon Redon’s The Cyclops. As always, the works that follow were made in a short time — and for all previous editions of The Kick-About, go here.
Kerfe Roig
“I’ve done lots of work inspired by Redon, but I’ve never done anything with his floating eyes. Having brought only a few collage boxes with me, I found that the cosmic one would do perfectly. I looked through the magazines I had for eyes. I will be very sad when print media disappears. And I also wrote a poem.“
The Eyes of Redon
We have returned, they said,
to open your mind, to fill you
with the spirits of the dark
and all that your eyes can’t see–
we existed before cosmos,
before time–we bring you
the true being, the unexplainable
formlessness of the remotest
and most invisible blackness,
the true beginning without end
Ashley
“When I looked this artist up all I could see were heads, eyes and flowers in vases! So below is my take.”
Gary Thorne
“Redon is vibrant and moody; however, I might have only managed the vibrant. Sad to see the crocosmia drying in the garden, and very reluctant to cut it, I’ve given it a fresh lick of paint to cheer it up.”
James Randall
“So I did a little Redon investigation and didn’t find anything inspiring, so I just set about interpreting the Cyclops and Galatea tale in a desolate landscape. As I went along, I included clouds of dots as parts of the two figures — these felt like drone clouds, and I ended up adding a data-centre box shape. So that one is up for interpretation. The second image is more straightforward, but both figures are male.”
Charly Skilling
“I was struck by how much emotion Redon was able to conjure from a single eye, so I spent some time playing with pencil, oil pastels, and crochet to see what I could achieve. The crocheted iris is quite pleasing, but the surround doesn’t quite work. Overall, I personally think the oil pastels have more impact.”
Phil Gomm
“When I think about ‘The Cyclops’, my mind goes immediately to Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion monster in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958). Maybe for this reason alone, I looked instead at the smallest example of a cyclops I could rustle-up, hence my decision to create an upscaled version of a one-eyed water flea. The Cyclopoida are an order of small crustaceans from the class Copepoda, and while my model is not 100% accurate, it’s not too far off. Ultimately, my water flea looks like something you might see served on a bed of lettuce, but as I had some resin left over from The Kick-About No. 164, I decided to display it inside its own watery orb.”
philgomm.com / behance.net/Phil_Gomm
Tom Beg
“Some kind of cyclops spider thing…”
Graeme Daly
“The story of Polyphemus, seen in The Cyclops and depicted as a man-eating, one-eyed giant, made collage feel like the way to go! I sourced images from the public domain and arranged them to help tell the story behind The Cyclops. I always love leaning into the Dadaism of collage!”
@graemedalyart / vimeo.com/graemedaly / linkedin.com/in/graeme-daly / twitter.com/Graeme_Daly / gentlegiant.ie
Next time, our prompt is Hermína Týrlová’s The Glass Marble (1963), a film in which an ordinary object becomes the starting point for an extraordinary journey.
Red's Kingdom 
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