Reflection

A picture of the real garden gate and of my construction in process.

The finished piece:

          Last class we critiqued our finished pieces, and so we received some valuable feedback with which to move forward into our next exploration.  Some of the comments about my piece were that it was "playful", "busy" and not of a real life landscape.  Others remarked that it was hard to tell whether the white swirls at the bottom was snow or a pond.  Indeed, when creating this I at first had perceived it to be snow (and so I added a reflection). Yet because this reflection was so strong, now it can also be perceived as water.  I liked the mystery between the two concepts, which are both very natural and would both fit in such a scene.  Another girl said that it had too much white.  In the future I will double check my colors at the end to see what stands out, because after I've been staring at a piece for a while I start to ignore certain aspects of it.

         So moving forward, I want to continue this slight air of mystery in usual, everyday objects.  For my little piece I am starting now, I am blending the properties of a real-life, complex flow bud with a very representational stem.  This piece I am expecting to alternate with my main one between class and out-of-class studio.  Here are some internet photos I am using to base my flower off of:

The ones of my own:

For my large project, I want to do the idea of children's forts imposed with Nomad-style tents which people actually live and survive in.  As a kid you think you are braving the wilderness of your family room, and the thrill was quite exciting.  I want to show this again in my next piece.  I received positive feedback from the size of my last one and time put into it, so I think I will continue the larger-scale painting again.  This time it will be two layers of canvas stretched on one stretcher.  I want to rip the first layer away to resemble someone looking into a regular, canvas tent.  Inside the second layer of canvas I want to put this mystical haven I used to pretend I lived in when I was a child.  

This picture is the beginning reference to this, but by no means final.

Artists

I am really interested in this piece of Todd Lanam's because of the way it is rendered, with transparent layers.  It is interesting how one can see through the brick wall into the greenery on the other side.  This is the complete opposite direction in which I have been going in my current piece because I've been constructing blocks of wood to make the wall as opaque and obvious as possible, but I wonder if I could use this effect in blurring parts of the background.   I love the contrast between the red and the blue paint and the corner- it finishes if off really nicely.

This Rauschenberg is a favorite piece of mine, mainly due to the left-hand side.  I really want to look into collaging and pushing that more than I have in the past.  Its interesting that he added vintage-like photos.  Maybe by adding some vintage elements I could antique my pieces in attempt to date them- but I don't want to cross the line of being cliche.  I'll have to think about this more in my upcoming pieces.

I think Yu-Shioh Wong's Afternoon Light is an interesting way of combining two ideas about one object!  My side piece critiques two views of a plant but both are 2-D.  This takes it a step farther into actual life.  

I love Gerhard Richter's textures:

I played around with something very similar to this in my painting this morning, but so far I am not convinced it works in the context of the rest of the painting.  Maybe I will go back to this textural painting style once things are more established.

Jennifer Bartlett also had to work to ensure that she conveyed all parts about the image she needed to while having the canvas split up and some parts of the image unavailable:

David Hockney's portrayal of paths is one solution to a problem I've been trying to work with in my painting: how to add a fantastical path which trails off into the background while making it halfway convincing at the same time (and not dominating the image!)  This image is really helpful to me:

I really enjoy this image by Eggebrecht.  Ive never seen it before, so thank you!  Very captivating, mysterious.  Not too much is revealed but it still has a surreal, mysterious effect to it.  Interesting how she made the wood very realistic.  Do you know if this is a collage of real wood or is it painted?

It is really interesting that you brought this image up by Van Gogh- I did a painting of shoes about 4 years ago which looks similar to this, but I've never seen this image before.  How interesting!  Although his use of texture is much more convincing than how I painted my own set of old boots.   I really enjoy this picture, and will definitely keep this in mind when working with more found objects of my childhood in later paintings.

here's my old painting:
(I'll post this later because for some reason it keeps rejecting it in the upload)

Painting Proposal

          As I stated in class, I wish to compose a set of memory-scapes for this semester.  They will explore the difference in stationary objects as you yourself change and grow up.  I wanted to explore this idea because it is my first year at college, and I am noticing things which I used to view in a different way when I was little.  I think the fact that a stationary object can in a sense grow with you as your perceptions of it change. Its fascinating and a little frightening.  Yet as someone pointed out in class, my idea is mainly conceptual without a lot of technical backing.  This and hunting for effective source material will be my biggest foreseen challenges.
          Currently, I have two pieces in mind, one which I will start tomorrow and the other I will start at home and bring to class next week.  One will be a diptych which is set on top of one another.  My father worked on a nursery for a while and therefore I grew up with many flowers which have certain meanings to me.  As I grew up, my drawings of these flowers changed from simple representational drawings to more observational studies.  I want to explore the difference between two different painting styles which both convey the symbol of flower, yet can be effectively joined to mean the same thing.  For my second painting, I wish to represent the symbol of a garden fence which always seemed huge and imposing to me as a kid.  I want to construct an actual fence out of wood which seems to be gigantic in scale, and then to paint on top of it one's perception of an old weathered fence which most people would pass by without looking at.  At the end of this semester, I wish to have about 5 to 8 paintings which will be pretty large in size.  I want to push my boundaries in size and also in painting surfaces.