Midterm Art

This piece is a sunset on the water with two children playing by the water. This piece is intended to show the style of Cara Waker and Claude Monet. The background and water are intended to look like Monet's style. I did this by using vibrant colors, a red sun, and very impressionistic water and sky. Monet used so many different styles when painting, so I tried to pick a couple to emulate and adapt. Meanwhile, the silhouette is intended to look like Walker's style. I designed the silhouette characters in my sketchbook so that they could be complex. When I painted the tree, which didn't end up as good as I hoped it would, I realized that I would not be able to paint characters so complex. Because of this, I took a picture of my sketches, changed the size, traced them, cut them out, painted them black and glued them to the canvas. I chose to create this specific artwork because I thought the reference photo for the sunset had interesting lighting. In this piece, I used lines to show the mountains in the background, reflections in the water, and the silhouette in the foreground. I used lines to show shape. I used lots of color in this piece which represented value. For example, in the sky, I used yellow to show lighter areas and pink/orange to show darker areas. I used dots to show the texture of the water and lines in the shadows. Also, both of these things are meant to show form.

In my piece, I decided to use formal balance by adding the sun in the center of the sky. Also, I put the subjects about even on each side of the painting. In addition, I used silhouette lighting and a high horizon line. While I was working on this piece I changed and revised most of the pieces. I started with a very realistic sky, but I looked at some Monet paintings and made it more impressionist (I don't think I changed it enough though). I also repainted the water several times. In this piece the part I changed the most was the grass. I still am not entirely satisfied with it. It started out as my attempt at the Monet style, but I decided that it would have silhouette lighting, so I changed it to the Kara Walker style. I continued having issues with the grass because my brushes kept acting up.

The idea of this piece is a sunset with children playing. This is somewhat representative of my childhood because my favorite thing when I was 7 was playing by the tide pools at a beach I visited regularly. In addition to that connection to my life, this piece was really good practice painting. I never try any style of painting other than abstract, so this was also a lot of experimentation. Overall, this piece turned out okay.

I would change the following in this piece:

• The color of the sun is too red
• The mountains are to in the correct style
• The sky isn't in the correct style
• The tree is badly done
• The grass is too thick
• The characters don't have an even layer of paint on them. I really wasn't sure if I wanted to add this, but I decided to add this, so the paper would blend in more with the canvas.

I was not happy with the original artwork for the reasons listed above, so I restarted. Because I already did a full reflection on the painting, I did not do one for this piece, but I wanted to add a quick written explanation.

The background is done in the style of Kathe Kollwitz and the silhouette was done in the style of Kara Walker. The background represents what happened in a Ohio courtroom on Wednesday, but the silhouette shows how inaccurate news sources twisted this tragedy around (namely fox news).