Sustained Investigation #16

This is the final rendition of my project pertaining to materialism and the influences that advertising and commodification has on people, and more specifically women. The painting portrays six figures shifting through different phases of consciousness and color, all surrounded by manifestations of money. There in a centerpiece of a sun which all of the figures are connected to. The first section contains a sleeping woman with a greenish yellow hue surrounded by disposable and temporary products. In the second section there are three figures, each one more awake than the one before. It is meant to show a direct confrontation of money and its hold on women, represented in the painting by a snake and an excerpt from Paradise Lost in which the snake observes Eve through a very obscene and voyueristic monologue. The third section depicts "fancy things" like a gold chain, red velvet curtains, fancy candles. There are two women in the third section, both falling back into sleep, eventually circling back to the original melancholic green that the project began with.

This project works heavily with shape and color, and I also tried to convey a sense of movement from left to right. The colors are divided between warm colors (yellow and red) and cool colors (blue and green), there are very few midtones, which remains consistent with my previous SI's. I use color contrast as a parallel to my inquiry question about comedy vs. subject matter. I kept all of the shapes very soft and overlapping, meant to show a sort of unity in their movement across the page/across levels of awakeness.

This project is the largest I have made so far, about five feet in width and three feet in height, and I'm quite proud of the effort I put int it. I spent a total of a little over two weeks on it, and overall I probably spent about thirty or more hours on it. I stayed very cognizant of the bigger picture, as well as mistakes I have made in my previous projects. The project conveys the topic and sustained investigation well, and also has a pleasing aesthetic and overall composition. There are a few things that I plan to change however, I would like to re-sew it, as it ended up with uneven edges on the section farthest to the right. I also think it would have been more pleasing to be a more consistent fade to green in the last two figures, since the last figure is the darkest but has no fade into the figure above.