Cookie Monster Held in Blue

Cookie Monster has never looked this quiet. In Cookie Monster Held in Blue, the googly eyes, the wide open mouth and the cookie caught midway toward it are held inside a plate of deep blue coloured mirror glass, reduced to a few insistent lines of light against a field of near black blue. What was once a shout of childhood joy becomes, here, something closer to a held breath.

The work keeps only what matters. The eyes, the grin, the loose cross hatched fur along the jaw and shoulders are pulled out of the surface as a field of individual marks, while everything else is left to the mirror itself, a deep blue that swallows detail the way night swallows colour. Cookie Monster's famous hunger is still legible, but it is no longer loud. It has been given weight instead of noise.

Blue carries its own meaning here. Where the original character lived in warm, mischievous colour, this surface turns that same blue cool and reflective, closer to memory than to a Saturday morning. The colour becomes a kind of distance, the fondness still there, filtered through something more contemplative.

Because the image is scratched into coloured mirror glass rather than painted or printed onto it, the surrounding room is always part of the work. Walls, light fixtures, whoever is standing in front of it, all of it appears in the undisturbed blue around the figure, so the viewer is never simply looking at Cookie Monster. They are standing inside the same blue he does.

The scratches are always present, with or without direct light. What changes is only the reflection around them, never the image itself. Light does not create this Cookie Monster. It sharpens the grin, deepens the contrast between the fur and the void, and lets the surface hold its own quiet shine.

Cookie Monster Held in Blue continues the Art on Mirror series by Tijs Dragtsma, in which scratched imagery is set into coloured mirror glass and the viewer becomes part of the work. This work is unique.

"Even hunger, held still, becomes a kind of light."

More about the artist, process and materials can be found on the About page.

Questions about this work, availability or shipping can be sent through the contact page.