11. Independent #3

Artist statement

This is my third piece in my independent project assignment, a collection of work whose requirements are open ended but hopefully will start to guide us to what we like to focus on when starting to collect pieces for our college portfolio. Diverging, at least media wise, of what I’ve used for my past two independent projects, I decided for this piece to revisit acrylic paints; something that i had previously abandoned in a older work out of frustration and disappoint. Starting out on a small stretched canvas, I decided to first focus on my main subject of the piece; an aerial observation of a honeybee. Though honestly I probably should've done the background first, I was conflicted on what color it should actually be; which then led me to start on the bee itself and then revisit the problem with the background in the future. Knowing that the bee would be my only subject in this piece I decided to place it directly in the center; to both establish it as the main focus and to meet my needs of symmetry that I often like to obtain in my work.

Honestly this piece was fairly straightforward in completely, the evolution of it at a minimal if any happened at all. Has I mentioned above I was facing a conflict on what I was going to be painting the background of the piece, my reason why I decided to paint the bee first, but after I finished the bee and played around with a few color swatches I then decided to pick a dark green. After that no other evolution or changes were made to my piece, matching almost perfectly with what my rough draft had looked like.

The subject of this piece does hold a bit of emotional attachment to me, as my family owns beehives and my mother as a beekeeper. When I was younger bees were never something that partially plagued my mind, perhaps I was a bit bias with my experience of getting stung by a bee as a child, but once I started to attend classes with my mother and learning the history of beekeeping and beekeeping itself, it was like a whole new world opened up to me. I began to develop both a love and dedication to these yellow little insects, my amazement only heightening as I quickly learned of all the amazing things that their able to do. Honoring that love that I have for these lovely creatures, I realized that making a piece of artwork focusing on them would be a great subject for my third independent project.

In all, I think this piece came out fairly well. I really love the highlighting and shading that I was able to achieve on the different sections of the bee; especially since I was coming back into acrylics with a sour outlook on the media. I think my second attempt with acrylics came out good, making me want to revisit this media in the future; perhaps to expand on this honey bee subject. The only thing that i would perhaps change in this piece would probably be something to do with the background. I really like the color that I choose, but I almost want to add some sort of texture to it; or maybe even make the definition between the bee and the background a little bit more highlighted. But besides those potential changes, overall I really like how the piece came out.