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The stages of Project #5 have been focused detail work on the scarf (which took a long time) and the details of the glasses.

Although I am not nearly satisfied with where I stopped, I do not have anymore time work on it.

Final Project: Final Product

On 5/4, the day of our critque, I really had to push myself not to be bogged down by detail. I was much easier to work gesturally on the leaves because there was a texture to them and indistinctness of individuals whereas it was more tempting to depict each stone individually when it came to bridge. But thanks to time pressure, I was able to explore the liberating process of platte knife painting to at the next level. I think this last stage allowed me to finally achieve my goal. I now can see the Leonid Afremov and the Stephanie Trenchard in my piece. Most importantly, despite my initial apprehension and reservations, I am actually satisfied with it.

Although I could have helped myself by choosing a less intricate photograph to work from, I am actually happy that I chose the photo I chose because it really pushed me to grow as an artist.

Progress on Final Painting by Wednesday 5/3

Even though I started out painting the ground very expressively, when it came to the brick work and the tree trucks, I was still focusing too much on producing super realistic details. Given the time I had left and my goal of working expressively, I pushed myself to achieve this goal. So I used the method of dubbing to depict the painting. However, my careful work on photoshop, at the beginning of the project, of playing with the colors was helpful because I was still able to pay attention to those color variation to show depth and spatial arrangement.

The top painting, Emerson Burkhart’s The Animal Nature In Man, was one of the paintings that I chose to closely look at during our visit to the MIA. I Like his thick application of the paint which exaggerated the texture of every object in his painting. Because I wanted to focused on the wrinkles for this painting, I decided to look at more of his paintings. My goal is to incorporate some of his style when depicting the wrinkles in my grandma’s face and hands.

Monday 4/24

Progress on Painting #4

I decided the grids would save me a lot of time and frustration, given the size of the painting and how easy it is to misjudge proportions. But now that I have spent a lot of time carefully laying down the main elements of the painting, I will try my best to stay true to my main goal and not get bogged down with too much detail. That is very necessary, given the amount of time I have left to work on it.

Progress on Painting #3 by the end of the 17-21 week.

I just notice a connection between my idea for my final painting and Stephanie Trenchard’s landscape paintings (though her paintings are more abstracted that mine will be). She also a path through the woods as a motif. Her works were recently exhibited in the Gorecki Gallery.

Progress on Painting #3

I started this painting by first laying down a general grid across the whole canvas. This made getting the proportion right much easier compared to my last painting where I didn’t use a grid. Then I worked on getting the major lines of the face and the clothes in. Then I worked from the background in, laying down general colors, value and texture. After that, I have been focused on getting the skin tone right. Since I played with the contrast of the original photo and because of the purple of the sweater, her face has a purple tone, so I am working and reworking the face to get that part right. In the meantime, I have cut the wood and built the frame of my next painting.

I have narrowed down my choices to three original images and above are some variation that I have played with. I have tried to crop them and rotate them in interesting ways. The motif of a pathway (be it on the ground or on the sky) appears in all three of them. This keeps my composition closely related with Afremov’s compositions. The vibrants colors I have tried to incorporate by playing with the tint, saturation and contrast of the colors also connect my possible compositions with his paintings. They also connect my work back to Francois Nelly, whom I mentioned during my research for my self-portrait; she is also my favorite Palette knife painter.

I think the leaves in all of these compositions will allow me to focus on the part-to-whole relationship, which I discuss in bullet #1 of this post. That is one thing I identified as one of my goals for this painting after our visit to the MIA, also discussed on the aforementioned post.

I have now blogged about enjoying both doing a palette knife painting and enjoying looking at palette knife paintings a number of times. Particularly in #5 of the blogpost where I make connections between some of my high school art works and my paintings in this class, I talk about wanting to use the method in my last painting. An artist I had research back then, before working on that painting was Leonid Afremov. After revisiting his work, I realized his work really fit with what I wanted to do for the last piece, a landscape painting. I think a landscape palette knife painting will allow me to step back and enjoy the painting process while still working observationally. As a detail oriented person, I have not been able to do that so far with the paintings I have worked in this class, as I was too focused on getting all the details exactly right. With this painting I want to mainly focus on exploring the medium further and immersing myself in a meditative process letting go, allowing myself to take risks and make mistakes.

Above are some of the examples of Afremov’s painting. In the next post, I will discuss some of the compositional ideas I have experimented with so far.

Final Reflection

At this point, I have decided to stop working on my painting. I feel that it is exhibition ready although it is far from perfect. I need to move on to a new piece and fixing some of the problems I see now means redoing significant parts of the painting as I would also have to adjust the areas around the problem parts.

1. Before, I only had rough sketches of the eyes that had somewhat proportional although the eye on the right side of the painting was supposed to by rounder. As I filled the eyes in and added value to them, I realized this and tried to make it rounder, which made that eye bigger than the eye on the left side of the painting whereas in the photo the eye on the left side is bigger because it is closer to the camera.

2. Elaine has also pointed out to me that the lips shrink as one goes from the left side of the painting to the right. I can also see it now that the rest of the painting is done.

3. Also in general, my cheeks are a lot skinner in the painting. My face is clearly rounder in the photo. My hair line is also flat for the most part whereas in the photo it has some dramatic slants on the sides. This explains why my forehead looks too big and unsettling to me.

3. Given how important the head-band and my hair are to the conceptual aspect of my painting, I feel I did not put in enough detail into them. But, I am very happy with how much I was able to accomplish in terms of figuring out how to paint skin and the rest of the face. So I don’t regret spending much of my time on the person. As Angela pointed out during the critique, my artistic identity has emerged through this piece and this was one of the goals we had set for ourselves as a class. Another goal I was able to accomplish was seeing with my eyes not with my brain. I really made myself see what was there in the printed photo, which was a little different from the digital photo, as it has more of a red tint in some parts of the image. Although I know my skin is not red and purple, pink and so on, I dared to trust my eyes. I would get so used to breaking down an object into color chunks that there were times when I would walk outside after spending hours in the studio and I would see the different color components of everyday things. I would even stop seeing the paved asphalt as just a gray piece of ground. That is when I knew I had achieved my goal. Another realization I had during the critique was that these distinct yet blended/ unified colors that I had in my painting captured the conceptual idea of the painting in a way that I hadn’t planned. One of the concepts I was exploring was cultural hybridity and the vibrancy and distinctness of these colors reflect that concept.

5. I have taken some close up photos of parts where I think I have used the paint effectively to depict form, color, texture spatial arrangement.

Final stages. Adding the details.

Progress in the past two days! I am slowly but surly getting there. I was getting a lot of positive feedback from my peers today, which motivates to work even harder on the rest of the painiting.

I hadn’t updated my blog in a while. Here is the progress I made during the past week. I was very intent on capturing the colors I see rather than what my brain tells me. But in that process, I ended up with a very chunky painting in which there were dramatic and sharp areas. So I am now going back in to try to be smoother with my blending

Thursday March 2nd

I does not seem like I have made much progress today because I spent class time fixing the proportions of my face. I thought I was careful enough in using my brush to figure our proportions but it turns out that I have been holding my brunch at just a slightly off angle. I think have even a simply grid dividing my painting into four quadrants would have been really helpful. This way I could make sure that my straight lines were actually straight and so on. Because on the bigger scale of my painting, my tiny errors led me to have the wrong angle for neck and the wrong size of shoulders and body in proportion to my face. It was a frustrating class but I am glad that I now have it figured out. Even though I could not get started on filling in the general values, I now have a good start to work with and I know I would not have to redo my outlines once I have started filling the values.

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Another artist I find inspiring is Leslie Barlow. I love her use of colors and her blending technique. I also love the realistic style that her work has. In this particular piece I like the symbolism she uses with the hair and coming it to the beauty of nature. Her use of colors and showing shadows and highlights is also amazing.

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Thea’s post caught my attention and after doing a quick search of Leslie Barlow, I have realized that I really like her painting style too! So I will continue to look back at her paintings.

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