Sustained Investigation #16

Along my many journeys at Alzar, we had expedition blocks that lasted for two weeks straight in the wilderness. While in Parque Patagonia in Chile, we came across many farms owned by gauchos, and one we even had the chance to visit. Seeing this, I took the opportunity to express my investigation and link this experience with skateboarding. I chose to make this art because this experience was one that stuck with me from my trip.

This was made by cutting the shape of the skateboard out of a piece of oak and mahogany that I laminated together, from a new design that I made with a split fish tail. Then I began to sand it to refine the shape and bevel the edges of the board all around. Using skateboard trucks I lined them up on the board and centered them to the center line, and proceeded to drill the holes making sure to counter sink for the bolts. Then I started painting and began to build up the layers with different tones and highlights off of my memory of the bright stucco houses and deteriorating buildings. I went from the back with the trees and field and moved forwards towards the foreground adding the fence and buildings. This time, I decided to not add a black border around it because I liked this messy kind of look.

In this artwork, I used color in all of the colors I mixed together to get the image I was looking for and value in all of the different values of the colors I made to get shadows and highlights in the tree and buildings. My project evolved because although I knew how I was going to mainly set up the artwork, I didn't sketch it out, so there are things the didn't turn out how I thought, but for the most part it did. Next time, I think I would add more detail and set it up a bit better.