The Painting Apothecary

Thursday, May 14, 2015

Personal Responsibility Thingy

I would have to say my overall goals for art are to better myself in all aspects, to improve my composition and execution, I have strong ideas but I tend to flounder on how to actually put them into a physical form. So I would like to be able to get to a point to where I can put my ideas down without worrying about absolute perfection in every little detail. My ultimate goal is to end up working along side my best friend as concept artists for the company Gearbox.

My short term goals are to excel at UTA and really work towards my dream job, I want to make some good pieces that I can show and sell to put into my portfolio.

And I'd have to say that my biggest roadblock as far as art goes is just getting frustrated and lacking the confidence in it. I tend to hit a point when I first start a piece where I hate it, but the more I work the more it comes out, I think that's where I need the most work, keeping my confidence from start to finish.

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

The Purrsistance of Lazy

This is my style piece, and my overall favorite project that I worked on in the semester. I chose Salvador Dali for my style project because I have always loved his nonsensical dreamy artwork, and he himself seemed like such a quirky artist. This is based off of his piece 'The Persistance of Memory' the piece that I am sure everyone knows, with the melting clocks. I chose to put a tree against a dreamy background, and paint dripping and melting cats in the branches, because cats tend to melt into whatever they're sleeping on.

My favorite thing about this piece is the cats themselves, I adore the way I rendered them and feel like I did a really good job getting them to look sort of stylized and weird. They're fondly called booger cats because of the color and drippy nature. I think my two favorite cats are the ones on the lower branches, as I think they came out the best! I love the color choices and I feel like they all tie together so nicely. It's no secret that I adore cats, so getting to mix my favorite animal with my favorite artist was really fun, this was one of my favorite project overall because it allowed me to flex my idea muscles and really play with what I can do.

I also learned how to stretch a canvas for this piece, which will be handy for future pieces. Overall I feel like this is one of my strongest pieces, the color and composition just WORK really well for me, I'm really happy with it!

Great Minds Think Alike

This piece was the subject I chose for my Medical Ethics project, my subject was the Nazi experiments performed by Eduard Wirths in Auschwitz, as well as many other concentration camps by other Nazi doctors. The experiments were horrific in nature, such as having a young boy strapped to a chair while a heavy hammer would periodically strike him, to simulate head trauma. Or experiments in which subjects were frozen to test the human body against hypothermia and frostbite. And experiments with chemicals and diseases such as mustard gas an Malaria.

The experiment that I chose as a focus for my piece is the Twin experiments. These were gruesome operations performed on identical twins, in which the Nazi doctors would forcibly sew them together, thus creating a man-made conjoined twin, These surgeries were often performed under no anesthesia, and with crude or unsanitary tools, leading to infection and other causes of death in these 'conjoined twins'.

For this piece I chose two 12x12 canvases, and attached them together using wood glue, the askew nature of this diptych is intentional to convey a disjointed chaos. After the canvases were attached, I printed the mirrored faces onto a red cloth using a mirroring program on my iPad, after they were printed I cut them apart, and sewed them back together, the stitching is meant to look shoddy, like it was hastily done but untrained hands. after the canvas was painted to the color I liked, I used clear gesso to stick the cloth pieces on the canvas, also askew, the tilted and disjointed look of the canvas and cloth was meant to appear unstable, and I think I portrayed it well. After the cloth was attached I painted over the edges to give it a dingy look, and painted over the stitching to give it the appearance of a badly festering suture. I believe I pulled off the effects in this piece well, and the overall feeling of dread and illness it has works for the subject.