I feel the wave coming,
I can tell that I will be creating soon because I feel it in my bones, muscles and forehead, the image of completed paintings are burned into my eyes as if I already have finished them, I feel my hands covered in paint and my heart feels lifted.
I will create.
Giants
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Giants is a painting that I have started working on this semester it is of a dirt road in the desert, on the road is a boy with blue shorts, a red shirt and black hair. The is wind blowing slightly lifting up his shirt, the wind is not coming from a specific direction. The angle of the painting is as if you were laying on the road and looking up at the boy who is at least 35 feet away from you with his back towards you looking at a desert mountain range in the distance. Behind the mountain range is a faint outline of a figure figure standing facing the boy with his chin up, you cannot see from his mid calf down, whatever substance he (the giant) is made of is blowing away to the right. The sky is clear for the most part besides a few small faint clouds. The sun is shining from behind the boy and the desert is bright. The color of the painting gets more vibrant as you get closer to the viewer, on the sides of the road near the viewer there are cactus flowers de ocotillo y tunas. Over this past quarter I have painted the mountain range in the distance and the shy three times over because they didn't look good enough. The sky was especially difficult because I needed to make a smooth gradient from light blue mixed with naples yellow hue to a darker blue but because it was such a large surface and the brushed I have are not extremely big, the gradient wasn't a smooth transition throughout. To create the feeling of the sky surrounding the viewer the gradient had to curved like a smiley face which also added difficulty to getting it right. The gradient that I landed on is still not perfect but is as close as I will get, no one can beat mother nature in the gradient game, Kudos.
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Gemhead
Gemhead is the painting that I finished this quarter, it is of a skull with blue gems in the eye sockets that are dripping into… gem liquid? On the top left of the skull is a large crack and out of that crack emerges larger blue quartz-like crystals. There is light coming from the top right direction. The skull is floating with a black background. The hardest part about this painting was understanding how light works when interacting with crystals, eventually I realized I didn’t need to me an optical physicist to paint crystals and I just made it up. This painting took me almost a year to finish and I am so glad it is over.
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Mother and Child
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Mother and Child is the largest painting I have done and has at least three different paintings on it. I started out last year with painting a person in a bubble, she was surrounded by creatures of light in a cave lit with green light. The next painting was the first version of the Pomegranate, a pomegranate seed holding a mother and child with a black and white ocean around them. The third and final painting is Mother and Child, Mother and Child is the same mother and child from the Pomegranate painting but the pomegranate seed transformed into a different shape (it’s a vulva… shhhhh don't tell anyone), the ocean around the mystery shape turned into a magenta and yellow sky. The hardest part of this painting was/is deciding what I actually want it to be, also I am scared to paint clouds because I haven't ever painted them before. This painting is one I have a stronger connection with and that is why I haven't given up on it, I made/am making it as a tribute to the mothers who work hard for their children, Thank you Mom.
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Laughing Woman
The Laughing Woman is a painting of a woman in the desert facing up towards the sun and smiling with her eyes closed. She is naked was a bronze milagro nailed to her chest in the shape of a heart the blood from the nail is dripping down her chest and abdomen. Her arms turn into cactus as you look further down her arm, the thorns that are facing in towards her body are poking holes into her skin and drawing blood. On her forehead there is a third eye with a blue and green iris looking directly at the sun. Her hair is long, curly and dark brown, you can see it go to her lower back. In the background there is a desert, in the distance there is a mountain range, the sky is clear and the time is about mid-day. The sunlight shines brightly on the woman and the desert, you can tell that she is sweating, and the shadows on her body are rather harsh. The hardest part about this painting is trying to get the skin tone and the facial proportions correct or at least close to realistic. I hate to choose favorites but if I had to it would be this one, this painting is what I am using to culturally express myself (if you read my spanish section you will understand). I love the colors in this piece even though they are not on the canvas yet, I can see her now and the way she is smiling is the way I want to feel everyday. While I love this painting very much I am having a lot of trouble painting her skin which I will talk to Meg about.
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Lear Mask
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Lear mask, the Lear mask was the mask used in the play Lear directed by Noah Witke Mele. The mask is 5 feet tall, and 4 and a half feet wide made from a cross shaped frame split vertically, thick wire for outlining the profile and outer edges, then chicken wire was used to form all the 3D detail like eye sockets, nose, mouth and cheek bones. I had help from the other theater techies through these steps and the first two layers of basic paper mache. After this I took it home over break and made all the smaller facial details such as wrinkles and eyes. The way I did this was I made cylinders out of the paper provided for me and I taped them down onto the face where I wanted the skin to be elevated for example, to make a wrinkle you would have to tape two cylinders down on either side of the wrinkle you wanted to be seen. After this I did three more layers of paper mache using wheat paste. The next step was to paint, I spent a lot of time trying to find the colors that looked realistically like an old man without looking super dead, once I did I painted it, I painted around the edge of the mask black and in a few of the larger wrinkles making sure that they didn't look uneven or too intense. Once this was done I put gold accents all over the skin especially in higher places on the face like the cheekbone, the forehead, the nose and a few of the wrinkles to bring more attention to them. The hardest part about this project was that I didn't have a huge amount of excitement towards making this, it just felt like work, an “I have to” instead of an “I get to”.
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