Advanced Studio Art (2023-2024)

Isaac DeHaven "Looking Back" (Completed)

8"x10", Acrylic on Canvas, 2023

 (IDEA) In Painting #1, during freshman year, I made painted a picture of a landscape of a mountain range at sunset, with the title "Mountain Landscape at Dawn" (found on home page, left). I was originaly inspired by Bob Ross and his beautiful realalistic style of landscape paintings. I wanted to do a recreation of my original painting for two reasons, my first painting sucks, and I wanted to do something my senior year as a callback to my freshman year.

(PROCESS) I usually make paintings on 5x7 canvas and I wanted to mix it up with a bigger canvas. I make I light sketch of what I wanted it to look like on the canvas and a more detailed sketch on paper to fit to the size of the canvas. I blended the sky and its reflection in the water. Then I took the paper sketch and made several others to cut out and tape of the sky in areas I wanted to stay sky. I painted the mountains using shades of blue, black, and gray. I used the edge tool to scrape white paint onto the mountains as snow. I mixed several shades of green, yellow, and blue and a tiny brush to place trees one by one. After that I added highlights and shading to the mountains and trees. After a class criticism I realized I needed the lake to distort the reflection so I re- painted the sky reflection and the mountains reflection, streching it downward, occasionally smearing my thumb horizontally across the water area to smear it. I used watered down white as a finishing touch to the water. I planned for a hill to be on the left side but I changed that to a closer rocky surface so I covered it in white. I sketched out the geometry of the  rocky incline on a scratch piece of paper and poked holes into key points/ angles on the sketch, laid it over the canvas and marked those points on the painting through the holes I made. At this point I was unsure about how to do the rocks in paint with how different paint is to the graphite sketch I just did and how the difference in the scale of detail I needed  compared to the much bigger and distant mountain. so I practiced painting it on the paper sketch and ran through several different ways to paint it. After I was satisfied I just did what I did on the paper onto the canvas. Next was the trees.

(SYMBOLISM & ICONOGRAPHY) The meaning of this painting is less for other people as it is for me. Its a personal callback and representation of growth over 4 years of practice and talent. this painting on its own has no meaning, only when it is paired with the original does a theme of self improvement emerge. 

(ARTISTIC GROWTH) there are two notible parts that were difficult in they're ovn kinds of ways. The sky took several weeks to blend the colors in a way I was happy with. At some point when I was busy on a side project someone just squeezed red and white paint onto my shelf area and it ended on the reflected sky. I just scraped off what I could and painted over it to fix it. Later on I got stuck because I wanted to have a rocky cliff on the left side and with the angle I planned to have it at detail was really hard to master. I had to have painted it at least 10 times before finaly settling on one of my better attempts.