This class was such a blessing to have taken. I learned so much about myself and my art through this class. I gained technical skills in acrylic, as shown with my self portrait, where I learned to balance lights and darks to make the piece more appealing. I leaned into my illustrative side on the Interior Spaces and the tarot cards and pushed the boundaries of my personal style. At the beginning of the class we did a prismacolor piece, which is one of my weakest mediums, and I learned techniques and skill and vastly improved my ability in that medium. You can compare that to the self portrait in prismacolors I did in Art 2, and you can tell what a difference there is. I loved seeing my peers interpretations of the prompts and it was amazing to watch them grow and change along with me. There is such a community of passionate artists all around me and I am very thankful. The palette knife painting in oils was a real struggle because of the large scale and the fact that I had to think of a creative color palette. I think I overcame that though, and I find the piece to be very successful in the end. So many of my pieces have started out shaky and ended better than I could have ever expected under the right guidance.
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My palette knife piece is one of my friend, whom most refer to as Marlena but few know her name is actually Weiner. Thus, I named this piece Ode to Weiner. It is a soulful and provocative piece that integrates the use of texture in the figure which is balances out in the smoothness of the surrounding blues. I decided to use warm tones to reflect the fiery nature of Weiner, who is a naturally wondrous human being. The background is made to look like she is submerged in the blue of the ocean, which counters the fiery nature of the foreground and thus evens the piece. If one were to see this piece not knowing who my lovely wife is, I would hope the colors shall show them what she is like, which is very happy and fun and in water.
This piece is the piece that took me the longest to finish. I think out of all the ideas I've had this was the strongest and truest to the prompt. The prompt was ordinary to extraordinary, and I accomplished this by using an ordinary medium, aka index cards and marker, and the extraordinary aspect comes from the mystical value of the images on the cards. The origin of tarot cards in a mystical sense is actually a relatively new idea, popularized in 1909 with the creation of the most famous artwork now known as the Rider-Waite deck. What's interesting is that the artist was actually a woman, named Pamela Smith. It was still new for a woman to attempt something so well known, but it definitely worked out for the better because of the immediate popularity of both the art style and the cards themselves.
The Interior Spaces project was an idea that let me get inside the space of a human mind instead of a tangible space. This triptych is about the classic Everyday Narcissist who believes the world is spinning for them. They sabotage themselves and feel bad for themselves later. On top of that they want other people to feel bad for them too, but not too much: no puppy-dog pity. The scenes my character is in are scenes personal to me. The first is a classic NYC subway car which I spent a good portion of my early life, The middle panel is the side of a street and the numbers outside the door are the last numbers of my mother's phone number which has the (646) area code from the city. The last panel is the swing set from the park outside my grandmothers house which is Riverside Park on the Hudson River. The pieces get progressively more grayscale and he becomes assimilated into his background rather than standing out. This represents how he is no different than any of the characters in the background which are the same in the first and last panel of the triptych.
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AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
January 2020
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