Exploration: Materials and Theme

This is a recent experimentation mixing used paper paint palettes and gold leaf. The leaf is used as an accent around the dried paint to frame or adorn it. My exploration in thinking here was using a "valuable" material to celebrate the mistakes and happy accidents of painting. Although usually invisible in finished paintings, the artist's palette shows the artist's thoughts, mistakes in mixing, wasted material, and even spills here and there. It's an unapologetic documentation of the process of painting, and to me it's beautiful. This exercise for me was about seeing beauty is something raw or imperfect.

At my advisor's suggestion, I have begun experimenting further with some abstract figures I invented for his Multilevel Figure Drawing course in the Spring of 2016. These forms are made from leftover palettes that have been cut out; arms, legs, and heads made with ink and carsick give the different creatures feeling and action.

This particular composition felt to me to me like a kind of formation of someone. Gestation is also a word that comes to mind as it is set in a shallow box that envelops it slightly in its curled up position. This is a relevant exploration of my theme of vulnerability because people often think of "formative" times in a person's life as the most delicate and arguable most important periods.

I also decided to try mixing in more naturalistic forms to see how the abstractions could interact with them. This composition seems to teeter between anxiousness and hope. Perhaps the abstracted figures could be representation of the man's psyche. Perhaps they are representations of how he sees others. This is a vague train of thought, but it relevant to my interest in using the human figure.