Mrs. Colleen's Barn

        After working for a neighbor for a couple years, I've had quite the connection with the landscaping around her house. I have grown to love the land they own and always take pictures for potential reference since they have moved away. Once I took this picture, I fell in love with the changing tree and the way it perfectly showed the season we were entering. This is a painting I am very proud of and I love the way that it turned out. I don't even know what I would change if I could, besides using more techniques that would make it even more realistic.

Point of View

Just learned Point of View in photography! These are a couple of my attempts at that...they could be better, but I did my best. I'm definitely not a professional photographer! Worms eye, birds eye, and an experimental point of view were tried, while coming up with original subject matter. I'm trying to incorporate some of the composition techniques I learned. Hopefully even better work is soon to come!

Chuck Close

Chuck Close is a man of many styles. He has gone from abstraction to realism throughout his life. He does a lot of portraits with many materials such as oil, acrylic, ink, graphite, Polaroid prints, and many black and white drawings. He uses a grid system while painting and breaks his reference photos into pieces. He did this for "Big Self-Portrait", which I find amazing. His abstract style tends to have many mini paintings created into one big painting. He uses blocks of color and shape to form a larger overall shape of a face or such. Here is a link to find some more information on him, along with more photos of his work!

Chuck Close

Gallery Review of David Vitrano

            David Vitrano’s has an exhibition up at Meibohm Fine Arts. Showing off all his finest figurative work, he brought his own style to the gallery in “The Emergence of Form: Sculpture, Drawings, and Prints”. Looking at the pieces, a viewer cannot help but to be drawn in to the stories and processes behind them.

            Vitrano uses many materials in his works. In just one piece, he’ll use acrylic and watercolor paints, pencil, colored pencil, and pastel to express his ideas onto paper. The pieces that he creates are constructed with his hands, instead of his mind. Vitrano lets his hands make all the decisions when it comes to the ideas. In his artist statement of the show, he explains how he not only lets his hands make the decisions, but also the meanings. Once he has made his piece into some form, he considers it done, he explains, and lets the viewer interpret it.

            Vitrano works in his own way and adds his own personal touch to each piece. Not only does he show the final work, but he shows his process in each one. His style is mainly expressionistic. He tends to exaggerate the people and objects in his work to create emotion and stories behind them. He works with a loose hand to add splashes of color and direction to his lines that end up creating the forms in his art. When he works with sculpture, he leaves imperfections behind and everything down to fingerprints is visible. This allows the viewer to look inside his process of forming his work instead of just being able to see an end product.

            Many of David Vitrano’s pieces intrigued me at this exhibition. A couple of them were “Contemplation” and “Che Fai?” These two truly caught my eye. “Contemplation” showed an image of a women staring into the distance with a bothered and confused look on her face. With a warm color scheme, it doesn’t show an intense moment but it brings out the true emotions behind the face of this woman. There is a story to be told when seeing this drawing, created from watercolor and pencil, and it is brought out through the sharp lines and the form the figure takes. “Che Fai?” a sculpture that Vitrano created, also tells a story. Two figures emerge from this piece. A woman sitting on a couch with a man leaning over her brings forth questions and ideas of what could be happening. He left the sculpture with a raw feeling. No color was added and there were imperfections all over it. He left his fingerprints, rough edges, and cracks in the sculpture which is what really ends up telling the story in the end.

            Viewers of the exhibition could really see into the mind of the artist by the time they were done. It’s clear that he cares less about the work itself than he does the message behind it and the process it took to get it there. He had his most interesting pieces up that could truly explain his ideas to viewers. The exhibition was worth seeing, especially considering it was a different take on the way that art is expected to be created and displayed and that his style showed through each of his pieces very well.

John Singer Sargent

I really look up to John Singer Sargent. Knowing how badly I want to have the skill to do portraits, his paintings give me so much inspiration. I did some research on him last year for an art project and I still can't get over his abilities. I can't believe his eye for detail and how realistic he paints. When I paint, the little details mean the most to me. I think this is a reason I love his work so much. Every detail matters to him, whether its the way the light hits the face in a certain place or the creases in the eyelids, it's all there. You can see all the details in the folds of the ears and the creases of the fingers. His proportions are also perfect and precise. I could stare at his paintings all day and discover new things about them that I didn't know. I can only hope that one day I will be able to paint like that. I guess practice makes perfect!

John Singer Sargent

This famous painting by Sargant, Madame X, was very controversial. Orgininally it was painted so that one strap of the dress was hanging off the shoulder. It was considered a scandal because of the suggestive pose and strap, so he changed it so that strap was back on top of the shoulder. Overall though, this is one of my favorite paintings of his. The folds of the dress and the detail in the face and the ears just make the painting come to life and tell a story.

Ben McLaughlin

"Being an artist is totally self-indulgent, but somebody has to do it." 

After an ex-girlfriend decided to toss away all his old work, Ben McLaughlin started a new series of works. These works seemed to have a reoccurring theme of lonely scenes and titles that had nothing to do with the paintings at all. Every title is either from the newspaper, a radio, or a crossword puzzle. I find that to be almost more interesting than the paintings at times. It makes me think about how even though we are in one place doing what is important to us at that moment, the rest of the world doesn't stop with us. New events are taking place every day when all we can think about is our own lives. His paintings opened my eyes a little more and got me thinking. I am also very interested in his realistic style. Somehow he knows exactly how to make paintings look real and detailed without putting too much detail into. This is something I need to learn. I tend to take too much time with little things and I overwork the paintings a lot. I love that in an up close view of his paintings, you can see little brush strokes and imperfections. this is a great method for me to follow considering I have a hard time loosening up and working fast. He is inspiration for my landscape paintings and anything of the like. I love his approach to the seemingly unimportant and the way he turns them in to something important.  

finished drawing!

Aimee
11x14

I finally finished my first drawing of the school year! Although there are some things I could have done differently, I am very pleased with the way that it turned out. I can see my skills improving when it comes to portraits. I think I did well with the shading and knew where I should put the highlights and shadows. I know I probably could've gone darker with some areas and brought in some more values in others but I still feel successful. This was a real breakthrough piece for me because I've always had a hard time with faces. Of course there aren't any eyes in this picture, but I'll have to tackle that next time. The strongest part for me is the nose. That area becomes a focal point since glasses draw the eyes inward and frame that area. I think this is a very strong piece for me right now and would be great for my college portfolio.