The end of spring semester…a new beginning (again)
Hey Stranger!
I have had a lot of work I’ve been sitting on this semester, not uploading to this website. It’s finals week, so lots of finishing touches before all these go up. What another insane semester. I swear the changes that have occurred satiate me in so many ways, and the craziest part? This is only the start of the journey. I’ve felt on the precipice of something big, like -goosebumps-on-the-back-of-your-neck big, and my professors have noticed this as well, due to a series of little “breakthroughs” in how I work.
This semester I was back to my home (at the easel) and I took my work new directions. I started my studios first “large” scale work (it’s 36”x48”, which in my mind hardly starts pushing scale) but it is the largest oil painting I have done yet. I also explored a lot with my subject matter now that I’ve gotten quite comfortable using photoshop to digitally manipulate any reference photos I take. I explored thick, directional brushwork and less glazing. I’ve started picking out the rules taught in undergrad about oil painting and started breaking them more for my own research. I don’t clean my brush between colors, I use it to my advantage to make half tones and loosely cross stitch my brush so there are spaces where the colors from the previous layer show. Only toweling between colors when intuitively feeling it, and it’s uncovered a quality of working I want to continue refining. There’s areas within the painting that are still a struggle, backgrounds. So I started revisiting basic perspective drawing for a thick impasto nighttime cityscape. This one I use the same technique with brush in the figure but only use palette knife for the background. I’m pushing the line with how much control I truly have with my tools.
These are still being worked but I feel like I’ve uncovered key parts to my studio practice and generally, my thesis. I have a wall in my studio that’s covered in a giant mind-map with photos and red string connecting them. If you’ve seen that one scene from It’s Always Sunny, you already have the mental picture, stranger. I’ve added main historical and contemporary artists I am inspired by, photos from my childhood, some screen prints of concepts I want to revisit, and a mirror in the center of the mind map. Not for selfish purposes but a mental exercise. When I enter my studio space, I’m forced to look at myself and ask the question of where I connect in all the mumbo jumbo around me, I ask what my studio reflects back at me. I want my practice and my studio to be a space where I can face everything about myself. Being an artist, in my eyes, requires raw. I don’t want my pictures to be of aesthetics only, I am no commercial artist. In a way I feel like up to this point, I haven’t gotten to really tap into all the hard truths, the liminal, macabre, and gory, disgusting bits about being a person in my work. That’s the direction I want to go, so see you there stranger!
I feel like I am still figuring out the types of imagery I want to explore in my next body of work (my thesis! Oooh!). But now that I’ve had much practice with figure, I think I want to distort and deconstruct them. Do strange poses, like mid-fall for example, when looked upon, an audience can see the direction a figuring is falling but it goes out of frame. So this tension is created, because there’s now space filled by the mind put together with what’s actually there. That’s just an example of what I mean, to create a sense of movement and a piece of a story.
This summer, I am unsure how much studio access I will have, but I am ideating lots, and I will be drawing and sketching lots.
Til next time, stranger!
-Ana
