Self-portrait--my first departure from realism.
My sister, Anna, done in acrylic. I based this painting style on a method of drawing I'd been playing with at the time--where I'd draw without lifting the pen from the paper. I tried to achieve the same feeling using paint, the roundness and swirliness, while not resorting to a single black line. I have plans to paint portraits of dozens of people, everyone close to me really, all on these small, nearly square canvases which will cover a whole wall.
A houseboat, as Michaela imagined it in her postcard to me, sailing on a sea of orzo.
3 comments:
Portrait of Anna:
I am drawn to the swirling strokes, to the eddying locks of hair. The rich blue backdrop makes the flesh all the more radiant.
Houseboat:
There is a playfulness, an exuberance, I want to say a child-like innocence. The angles captivate me. The straw-yellow sea reminds me that waves live in wheat fields as well as water.
Self-Portrait:
There is so much I like about this work: the warm-cool rhythms, the scratched surface and the sullied earthiness; the liquid blue eyes with surrounding aura, the deep red lips, the ochre skin with shadow and highlight, all of this cradled in a satchel of dark hair with hints of auburn. I like her almost clerical, robed appearance, her blue garment, the way her hair dissipates downward like a priest’s stole. I like the mix of browns, the streaked reds, the swaths of blue, the textured patch of rust-orange, the sandstone pink in the upper corner. This piece strikes me as highly emotive, yet I hesitate to impose conventional emotional categories. To me it is liquid emotion, scraped emotion, sandblasted emotion, emotion etched in acid, emotion spread out, stretched and mixed. The work seems turbulent, yet the woman self-possessed and even calm. Perhaps more than anything, I admire this work on a compositional level, but this is a whole other area of discussion, and one I’ll reserve for a future date.
Post a Comment