Midterm critique is over! It went good. Things I need to work on: color palette, making it more diverse, using different colors, using different brushes, and perhaps work a little bigger. Also, I need to incorporate more colors were they aren't readily visible. Anyway, I'm glad that it's over, now I can go fourth and make work with these ideas in mind. I want to try and abstract the figure while also making other things like the background more clearer and concise. Hopefully this time next week I'll have pictures of new work to post. For now, here's some work from the midterm critique I haven't posted before.

This painting is close to finished, but not quite there. The skin is too pink. I want to add another layer, add a little yellow to lessen the red. However, I do like the way it makes the green in her eye pop.


 



I like the lines in this. I love the palette knife, it's my new favorite tool.





This painting is where I started using my palette knife. I didn't like how it was going, so I just added globs of paint with the knife, and I liked it, so I kept going. I really like the green sky and the stars.

 

Okay, so my last post said that I'd tell you what I thought was good and what made me want to claw my eyes out at the current exhibition in the Mason Gross gallery. Nothing actually made me want to claw my eyes out, but there were some things that were just more visually appealing than others. I'll start with the bad. On the whole Robert Nava's paintings were interesting. They were childlike and yet that didn't bother me. It was like a child had been given a huge canvas on which the could make a picture. I've heard people say " My child could do that" in reference to some artworks that appear primitive. And of course someone will retort that a child couldn't do that, because they couldn't think about composition, foreground/background relationships, etc. I kind of disagree, the reason a child couldn't do something like Robert Nava is because no parent would buy/ make a giant canvas for their child to paint on. True, their are parents who want to stimulate their child's growth, but most will settle for crayons and copy paper. Back to the point, I think a child could make a fairly decent painting if given the opportunity. Robert Nava's paintings are depictions of everyday things, through the lens of a child. My real problem is with this painting below:

    Okay, it's a police officer or a mail person ( trying not to be sexist) riding a cow, I think. But that's it. Where's the house in the background, wheres the  grass hastily put in with green scribbles. All his other paintings are more complicated in the fact that the canvas is filled. Maybe it's just me ( it probably is), but this painting to me feels the weakest of the group because to me it looks like something a child wouldn't do. I have a notebook from when I was in first grade. It's filled with scribbles of superheroes and Power Rangers ( cringing). In all of these drawings, I managed to make it feel like the superheroes were somewhere. Even if I just scribbled something from the superheroes to stand on. This to me just feels like a sketch for a larger painting. I can tell what it is, then I just move on, nothing holds me to make me want to look at it longer. Wow, glad that's over, hope I wasn't too rough. Despite the one bad apple I did enjoy the rest of Robert Nava's paintings, this one  painting just brought me down.

The only other painting in the show that I didn't like/ and or didn't understand was this:


I really don't know what to say about Katie Herzog's painting.The background is the most interesting thing, the mix of blues and purples and what looks to me like a footprint. It looks like someone started playing hangman and the lunch bell rang and everyone left before saying any letters.  Unfortunately I wasn't able to attend the lecture in which Katie Herzog was the speaker, so I don't know what she was trying to do or say in this painting. I don't want to speculate and come off as a ignorant jerk ( too late haha), so instead I'm going to move on.

My two favorite parts of the exhibition were the works of Aaron Gilbert and Lui Shtini. Aaron Gilbert's figures have an odd manaquinesque ( it's a word) quality about them. I f someone had just cut open my chest, I'd eitheir be screaming bloody murder or be dead and a little more loose. All the figures have an odd calmness to them, despite one being on fire and another being stabbed.



 The glossines of the surface of the painting and how rendered everything is also something I liked. Not to say that all the figures are neccesarily realistic, it's just that they have a computer generated quality that's interesting.
Lui Shtini's work also has a highly rendered, computer quality. All the works were interesting, the the painting at the bottom was the one that I looked at the longest, so it's my favorite.

The condoms in a petri dish are simple, then you have these black specks and you wonder what the fuck is that? Is it something growing outside the petri dish, some new lifeform? Is it casting it's own shadow or is it staining the surface of whatever it's on? I'm still scrtatching my head but I like how it gets you to step closer and try to see what's happening.

Well, that's all she wrote. I could have went further, but this is a blog and not a full length feature article. Next time I'll have another update of my studio and tell you all how my midterm critique went! See you next week, same bat time, same bat channel!

Okay, so here are the pictures of my last two paintings, then three I'm currently working on. The one's a landscape, because I'nm getting just a little tired of people at the moment, even though this painting has a figure at the bottom right.

I decided to add text to the bottom ( bad photo, I apologize), the text is from the opening sequence of the tv series Carnivale. It seems to me that he's talking to you, not giving you a warning neccasrily, but maybe a history lesson.

I love the face, you can tell it is a face without to much rendering, it's slightly blurred, like it's not completely there or completely still.

This one was just an exercise, I'm not really sure what I;m doing with it just yet.

 

For this one I wanted to try and use some realistic skin color, mainly just to see if I could. This photo sucks but Ilike how the color of the skin brings the green out in her eye. The reference I'm using the woman in it has suffered from eitheir a stroke or some kind of facial paralysis. I want to extend the blue lines more into her left side, make it look like it's spreading or has spread.

 

 

Again, little tired of the figure, so I decided to paint a red mountain with a green sky, with a red and blue moon, oh and a guy being impaled by a tree in the head, then it spreading to his hand and going up the mountain. Weird, huh?

 

Next time I'll talk a little about the current exhibition at the Mason Gross galleries, what tickled my fancy and what left me wanting to claw my eyes out.

 

       Okay, so I finished the two paintings I showed previously, I'll have pictures up by the weekend. I'm trying to think about ways to complicate the compositions I use in my paintings. After talking to Marc Handelman and my mentor Zack I think I need to start considering my composition more than I'm used to. Usually I have an idea for an image, then bam, I paint it. Most of my figures are plop dead center of the canvas, which to be honest is starting to get annoying. It's just when I start painting I tend to go to the center. Most times the backgrounds come into play as a whimsy or a happy accident. I don't really think about them as carefully and in context with the whole painting. Hopefully the next couple of paintings I do will try to tackle this problem I have. As to how I will tackle it, I have no answers at present time, if anyone has any ideas, please share! The next issue is surface, which again, I don't think about, or at least not as much as I should. All my paintings are dry. I use the minimal amount of coats of gesso than begin painting. For me it's about the image in my head and getting it on canvas. So, I'm going to try different surfaces and hopefully try to do different things with color ( quit using cerulean blue). Hopefully I'll be able to do this and not go back to default with my painting. Now time for the pretty pictures from my sketchbook.

Remember the sketch I did of the skull lady? Well. here's another one, she's not dead center ( well okay, kind of), but I like how I'm considering more than just one figure.

This is a sketch for a painting I'm currently working on. No, she's not making a funny face, her left-side of her face is paralyzed. I'm beginning to get interested in the idea that something in the body can be broken, like the brain, but you can still function, albeit with a little adapting and adjustment.