Vincent Garcia

Anne Gaines

Core Studio 2D

People assign and attach values and associations to objects and shapes that objectively have none. To make sense of the world around us we have built up layers of assigned significance to the objects around us to place them in context of each other. We do this to feel comfortable; people want and do things to make them comfortable and secure. My goal for my piece is to destabilize the reason and comfortability the audience has built up for themselves even just to understand the space and institution they have entered. I want the viewer to experience familiarity and specificity by looking at the ambiguous forms and blending edges I create on the canvas. I want the user to want and expect things of the forms and make their own associations and attachments to them. When you see a form or object you also see all the subconscious thoughts and memories of it, this is what I want the audience to experience.

My research and ideas were much too broad and conceptual to make a solid basis for my work. As I began to compose and lightly paint my piece I began to understand what I wanted from the paint as well as what I wanted to communicate. I knew I wanted to focus on expectations and associations, and how that relates to desire and mentally building around us a world that is logical for every individual, but I wasn’t sure how to translate these ideas in a 2D visual format. I believe this piece aligns with abstract expressionist and postmodern art. It is abstract in subject and rendering and it is meant to take exploit the meanings we built up because of modern life and extract them from their built up associations.

Something I am struggling with, as a first time oil painter, is that I am not using enough paint. I am afraid of the liquidity and slow-drying of oil so I have been building up thin layers of paint, instead of blending with thicker paint and medium. I need to stay conscious of this in order to continually improve. One thing I am doing that I consistently have is under painting in a mono/duochrome manner to set up the value and hue for the whole painting to be cohesive.