PAINTING
THE UNFINISHED PORTRAIT
The project was to create a self-portrait in the style of a well-known painting. I chose the Athenaeum Portrait by Albert Stuart. This picture hung in every classroom and in every school that I ever attended. It was the model for the image of our first president, George Washington, on the one dollar bill. It was the most well-known painting I could think of. When I introduced it in class, no one - not one student - knew this image. To me, it was always 'The Unfinished Portrait'. It was wonderful to produce and the amount I learned from the time spent creating it is priceless. Working in an environment where we are all working on different things together was truly inspirational, and developing a 'working schedule' is something that will permanently help me.
COWBOY BUNS
I had a lot of fun painting this project. This is a collage - a dreamscape collage - that we found in magazines and materials from home or in class. Our mission was to create the collage, then re-create the collage as a painting - not exactly, but with modification to suit. Working this semester on drawing and shading, curves and depth, I was able to apply the same techniques of artistic design but with a different medium. The ability to use what I learned in one form of art and apply it to a completely different form was transforming. Shading with paint, creating texture, amplifying it with colors of infinite degrees and going over it (literally) until I got it right was revolutionary.
THE THREE TREES
One of my very first and favorite paintings, completed in a class with instructor Emily Lyles in Fundamentals of Art, Spring 2024, this is the beginning of The Three Trees series. This was a study of depth, using color, size and detail to accentuate placement of objects in a field. I learned a lot from Emily, and this then, is where my love of painting began.
SKULL AND PHONE
Not much of a skull guy, I have had the chance to work with many objects that I don't know well, and would not generally choose to replicate. This has taught me a lot. What it taught me was that there is value in anything, and to not dismiss artistic opportunity due to personal preference - in other words, it opened my mind... my thoughts, and made fertile my artistic reference, the place I draw from. Working with India ink, water and paintbrush, this image was created from table objects in Tory Lent's class. We were instructed to look for the shapes and make them either black and white, and accentuate the negative spaces by using only black ink.
PLANT, POT AND BALL
The project was to create a rendition of a still-life, but to digitize part of it (20 or 30 squares) and pixilate it. This was an exercise in color blending and averaging colors in a square, relevant to the objects comprising the square. I liked this project very much, and practiced blending fanatically. The exercise of blending this way helped me in all aspects of painting, but especially knowing how to blend to achieve desired colors. This helped greatly with shading and developing depth in later works.
