Research:
For this project I wanted to do a painting since I’ve been apprenticing/assisting a painter in New York and wanted to continue working even though we’re in quarantine. For this project I wanted to use my boss’s technique which puts down and black and white underpainting, covers that layer with white, and then applies color one at a time. I did another painting uses this technique so I just repeated the steps for this painting as well. As for the subject matter, I couldn’t help but make something about what’s going on right now, so I decided to take a moment from when my roommate and I were leaving and got into a fight. He was standing in the mirror aggressively shaving and it looked so ridiculous that we started laughing/crying about the situation. It just seemed like the moment when everything started to get real, and reality sunk in.
Planning:
I feel like the planning of this painting was similar to the technique I used. Working with my boss, he taught me how to do this process to make the painting more dimensional. For the planning of the composition, I took a picture of my roommate before we had to leave New York and had to apply it to the only materials I brought with me. I was left with basic paint colors and one 18×24 canvas, so I decided I needed to fill the space with the figure and place it in a way that didn’t leave it too crowded/empty. After sketching out his face a few times on the canvas, I finally landed on a good placement and decided to start painting. I’ll attach the photos of my step-by-step painting process here:
Experimentation:
A lot about this project felt very experimental due to my circumstance. I normally make paintings like this in my established space where I have all of my materials/needs to explore with any medium I want. In this case, I’m stuck in my grandparents house with limited materials, so I had to get this right on the first try. The main experiment for this piece was to work with extremely limited resources, and to know that even if I wanted to, I couldn’t start over with anything else, and that added pressure was new. Also, this is definitely one of the biggest paintings I’ve ever done. I normally work with 18×11 canvasses and this one was double the size, so the face was enormous and my brushstrokes I noticed became bigger too which was a problem. If I had more time, I think I would’ve rushed less and made the underpainting tighter which would’ve made the neck/chest area look a lot less clunky.
Documentation:
Here it is! (18x24in)
