Since the first picture becomes the heading for the blog post, I'm leading with my strongest piece from my oil painting class. Which will probably make this post pretty anti-climatic. "Yep, that top one is pretty good, now don't scroll down. Nothing to see here."
I took an oil painting class in the summer of 2011. It was an... interesting class. I'm not sure how to summarize my feelings about it. The main thing I needed was just exposure to oil painting and a basic crash course on how to even do it, so you really can't go wrong there. However, the teacher's style was so antithetical to mine (he's a printmaker who loves precision, hates Impressionism, and is obsessed with still lifes of cupcakes) that, given the fact that I only ever took one oil painting class in my entire undergraduate career, I did leave the class (and college in general) feeling pretty unprepared to create what I really want to. Believe it or not, there's only so much you can learn form the Internet. Anyway, this class is what I got, so I'll go ahead and chronicle what I learned.
We started with a series of still life paintings. The first two were in full grisailles and not pictured here because, frankly, they're not good. Actually I wouldn't mind sharing them, but I am also too lazy to pull them out and take photos of them. The third still life was also my first color painting ever, unless you include dinking around with those acrylic powder paints as a child and turning a large section of the downstairs carpet blood red. At the time I hated still life, so by extension I hated this painting. I hung it up in my apartment anyway, because I wanted to hang up something and this is what I had. Everyone else seems to like it though, and it's grown on me over the years as I've learned much more about art and come to appreciate the still life genre. I'm especially proud of the cloth in this painting, except for the very bottom-left corner where it looks like the sheet is made of bioluminescent fibers. The biggest weakness of the painting is the plaster head, painted quite obviously without much understanding of how reflected light works. It almost seems to be hovering over the surface of the painting. I've since repented of my ignorance, but I'm not going to go retouch an educational exercise from three years ago, tempted as I am.
I actually don't even remember much about the process that led up to this one. The prompt was something like "pick a style and go with it," and the style I picked was surrealism. While you can definitely see the surreal influence, you can also tell that I knew next to nothing about art history at the time I painted this. Oh well. I was going for some kind of esoteric thing about symbols representing very specific objects in the real world, hence the actual head, heart and star being reflected in the mirror basically as emoticons. I still don't hate the concept, but it's a little too weird for most people so this one sits in my closet instead of on my wall. Interesting, I painted this with the head and heart upright and the bathroom sign man hovering sideways at the top of the painting. It never occurred to me to turn it sideways until I turned it in and decided on a whim to put it up sideways. I think it works a lot better this way, although it also makes me wonder about the readability of the concept this way. I guess the painting makes so little sense to begin with that I probably shouldn't really worry about it.
My teacher's main criticism of this painting (and all my work in general, actually) was that I was not focusing enough on small details. He kept telling me to buy smaller and smaller brushes. I definitely see where he is coming from; I tend to focus on the overall concept at the expense of minute details, and at any rate I prefer a sketchier, more impressionistic style. But he pointed out to me (and I agree with him) that my love of "Impressionism" was a crutch for me--something I used as an excuse to justify sloppy brushwork.
This one was basically pure torture to make. It was a "systems" painting, meaning that we had to come up with some elaborate system of composing the painting that took at least some of the process out of our own conscious or even intuitive control. This image is the result of a series of overlaid images gathered from randomized word searches and the Google image database. I don't feel like going into all the details about the process because frankly I think "systems" paintings are stupid and nobody should ever do them. Okay now I'm getting angry so I'm just going to roll with it. The worst part is that my teacher kept complaining that my composition was bad and I was like THAT IS THE WHOLE F&^%ING POINT OF THIS PAINTING. You can't tell to relinquish control over my composition and then complain that I didn't compose it well.
Basically, I don't think this painting looks terrible, but I still kind of hate it out of principle.
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The painting shown at the top of this post is a portrait of my younger sister. As is the case with many art classes, the final project for this class was "Do whatever you want." When I said I wanted to do a portrait because I love portraits, my teacher told me that wasn't good enough, that I needed some sort of conceptual framework, some pretentious principle to illustrate using the person merely as a medium for communicating how esoteric and indie I am rather than viewing and depicting them just because human beings are interesting and deserve to be represented (sarcasm added). I spent literally weeks agonizing over this, trying to figure out something I could express through a portrait. Finally the day it was due rolled around and I had nothing. I decided to just say screw him and abandon any attempt to follow his standard of pretension. I painted this in one 8-hour sitting, with absolutely no intent other than to paint a nice portrait of the person I love most in this world, and it is awesome and I got an A. I am currently sticking my tongue out at my teacher.
Because Dana was still living at home at the time (13 hours away in Seattle), and also because I probably would have felt bad making her sit there for 8 hours anyway, I painted this from a photograph. It's a candid shot taken between poses for senior pictures. (Painting from photographs is another controversy; there's plenty of information on both sides to this debate all over the internet, but in summary I think that drawing from life is essential when learning but that once you have internalized the skills it is perfectly fine to work from photographs.) I think it captures her personality perfectly, as does just about everyone familiar with both her and this portrait. This is still, in my opinion at least, the single best piece of artwork I have ever created.