The inspiration
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'The twins'
The inspiration for this work came from the model. Jacob had no idea what to make when Molly, a young Californian girl, a bit lost in Toulouse, called him just a few days after her arrival in France, right from the USA.
At the age of 19, she eventually was looking for some freedom and she wanted to prove her liberty by posing in the nude, just 6 days after her plane had landed.
Molly was a model who was convinced of her own beauty, what is rare.
On each photo she lookes at us with a alluring smile.
It was her open, free and tempting look which was characteristic for her and needed to be emphasized.
An inflatable dragon in a catalog made Jacob think of Molly. He doesn't know why, but instantly he didn't just know what his drawing would look like, but also had found a title: The Twins.
He had over a hundred photos of Molly and with a combination of two of them, he could make it.
Molly stayed in Toulouse for a year and the drawing as well as the title pleased her.
'The anamorphy'
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An anamorphy is a deformed drawing, that refinds its proper dimensions by looking at it in a counter-deforming mirror.
The source of inspiration was Jacob's brother Evert who amused himself by Jacob's cylinder shaped chrome tea-table.
This time, the model wasn't too important. First, one had to understand the laws by which the table distorts everything in front of it.
Jacob has made a vast number of sketches to find the right mathematical formelas. And then he had to feed them into his computer and have the inverse formulas drawn by a plotter.
"Their inverses" as he needed to find the correct representation of a distorted image and not the wrong representation of a correct image.
After a certain time, it became evident that a cylindric mirror makes everything far from the mirror smaller. To say it otherwise: to obtain a correct representation, you have to enlarge everything that is far from the cylinder.
A standing women would have been impossible, She should have had an enormous head. Jacob found the solution by placing a woman close to the mirror, except for her feet. The result is a slightly curved woman, but progressively deformed to her giant feet.
Here are some papers, which preceded the calculations
'The folding chair'
(95-50)
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This time it was a little folder from a women's dress shop, that inspired Jacob.
The photo was near perfect. What lacked was a bit of dymamics.
At several occasions, Jacob photographed his models in this pose, like Fabienne here.
At last he has chosen to draw Isabelle, who hoped to be drawn in handcuffs, as she wanted to exress her preference for submissiveness and bondage.
But the drawing of a folding chair occupied Jacob already for several months. He knew axactly what he wanted to do: the hair in the wind, the leg more joyful. For one time, Jacob was egoistic and didn't draw 'Isabelle in cuffs'.
'Blake and Mortimer'
(94-70)
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Since his young years, Jacob found the drawn adventures of Blake and Mortimer most fascinating.
He even inspected the sites were the stories were supposed to have taken place:
to really feel the vibrations of the books:
'Sylvester'
(94-40)
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Sometimes, even a simple box of cheese can be a source of inspiration.
One has to admit that Maryse had said that she loved cats.
Jacob didn't want to draw a real cat and the cheese box provided the solution.
How does Jacob work?
All Jacob's models
Series No 1
Series No 2
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