Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Venus of Where?

Yeah, yeah. Almost two months without a blog update; I've been slacking. But instead of boring you all with stories about how I was ridiculously busy with final projects, entertaining my parents who came to visit, trying to take a break from the world, and reading an obscene number of comics, I'll just jump in and tell you about my favorite painting I've done.


The mission for our final Figure Painting was to take the model and place her in an environment.

Initially, I was thinking of doing something completely fantastical and crazy in the background, like aliens attacking, the apocalypse taking place, unicorns, dragons...

But then I thought about the pose (which was debated about for almost an entire class period because compromise doesn't make people happy...) and this painting from art history came to mind.
So I decided to mesh the two together: A parody of a painting from art history with surreal and fantasy elements. Oh, and a mini self-portrait, too.

We were on a pretty tight schedule and only had a few weeks to work on this one. I ended up putting in around 12 hours of work in one day to finish it in time for our final critique. Thankfully, I wasn't alone...I had some powerful backup in my homie and former roommate Marcel. He was there working on about eight of his abstract paintings at once. It's always great to have someone to bounce ideas off of, especially when he's Marcel. Check out his new website, by the way! iammarcel.com

And here's the end result. See the little mini-painting of Venus of Urbino in the background? Isn't it clever? Isn't it?

There's a little cow there, too! For all of my out-of-state homies, that's the Empire State Building in the background. And Godzilla.
I was going to add more to the table there, but I was running out of time and had no references for what I wanted to add. So a lonely egg timer sits on the table, waiting for the day it will be used. Unfortunately, that day may not come because Godzilla is not far away.

It sorta looks like me. Am I tipping my hat or is it slipping off my head? And what is that mysterious book? Marcel suggested that it be "Mein Kampf" and I thought that would be hilarious because my sense of humor has been twisted by my friends. But I left it blank.

Ad a closeup of the model, Lauren. It took me forever to get her face ironed out...the way it connected to the neck and the shape of her face and a billion small things were throwing me off. So I added more hair so you can't see much of the neck and it was magically fixed! Cool how that happens, huh?

1 comment:

Julie said...

This came out so great! I'm always super-impressed with how much perspective you get across in your work.