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Illustration Friday

(Anti) Super Hero - Doamna Tomescu

This is the (fishy) tale of Doamna (Mrs) Tomescu.  Really little is known of her early life apart from the fact that she is Romanian by birth, and reputedly worked as a nurse in one of the hospitals in Bucharest before leaving rather suddenly - under mysterious circumstances - in about 1969. 

She immigrated, alone for the whereabouts of her husband was never fully explained, to Russia and found herself a new life in Vladivostok.  Unable to get herself a job as nurse, apparently she was unable to supply any references from her time in the Bucharest hospital; she had little option but to seek alternative employment.  Thankfully, she was able to find a position on one of the fleet of Russian factory ships that operate out of Vladivostok and seek to catch fish in the Bering Sea and northern Pacific Ocean.  The factory ships are self contained factories on the sea that catch fish and process them onboard and when the freezers are full they return to port.

This tough life, indeed no life fit for any woman really, involved the constant sorting, gutting and cleaning of fish.  As is often the practice in these commercial long line and deep ocean fishing operations there is significant by-catch (non-targeted species of fish).  The drawing highlights one of the rat-tail species, so called because the body of the fish quickly tapers down to a long tail a la a rat’s tail.

Most of the by-catch is inedible, foul-tasting, and occasionally toxic and is usually thrown back overboard to let the sea birds, sharks and other sea predators pick over the carcasses.  As an aside as these are deep water fish and are hauled up to the surface they die because of the change of pressure and most of the fish end up having their bladder displaced – this is clearly evident in the fish Doamna (Mrs) Tomescu is holding.

For whatever reason, Doamna (Mrs) Tomescu, quite enjoyed the work, she especially enjoyed dissecting some of the more unusual by-catch, a practice that was frowned upon because if you’ll pardon the pun there were bigger (non by-catch) fish to fry.  Some of her fellow workmates couldn’t understand her occasional surreptitious chopping up of the fish bladders in particular.  But that is understandable for they did not have Doamna (Mrs) Tomescu’s medical background.

Without embellishing this story any further it was no coincident that Vladivostok at one point went through a spate of largely unreported deaths linked to what was originally believed to be alcoholic poisoning – a relatively common occurrence given the propensity of the population to drink vodka during the colder months.  Yet no one made the connection between the factory ship’s return to port, and Doamna (Mrs) Tomescu’s nocturnal pursuits, and most noteworthy that the symptoms of fish poisoning can mirror those of alcoholic poisoning.

Fugu anyone?

Commentary:

I’m really quite happy with this drawing.  The idea had been floating around in my head for a while, but as per usual getting the composition right in my mind before putting pencil to paper was the major stumbling block.  That said, once the drawing process started there were still a number of pitfalls to overcome. 

I started with the face, which came and went relatively easily, I got the intensity as I wanted it.  The next hurdle was getting Doamna (Mrs) Tomescu’s shirt the right shade to complement the values of the face and getting those folds to a state where I was happy with them.  I then darted back to the headgear, this is a less pleasing aspect of this work, still I didn’t want the headgear to dominate and take attention away from the face or the fish she was holding.

The arms were next, a relatively simple task I must add.  That left me with the fish, the most intricate part of the drawing, one where I could’ve over-egged the cake and being left with the fish dominating the composition.  In the end the balance is pretty good.

And finally, that left the apron – which looked oddly out of place as pure white space before I began putting the folds in.  I dreaded this final bit, because everything else was completed and this left a lot of opportunity to muck it all up by doing a shoddy job on the apron.  Still it turned out OK.