Unit 1
Although I may not believe in titling my work I have anyway because it’s part of the assignment. I am going to call it Looking in the Mirror Except Neither the Person in the Reflection nor the Person Looking in the Mirror Are Me. I like this title because it’s saying something, but still leaves things up for interpretation which I think is a valuable thing in a piece of art.
When painting and fleshing out my idea for this project I wanted to make it look dreamy and unreal, similar to images from that website that generates faces of fake people. The content of the painting is something that happened in a dream I had, although I did do some embellishing to further my idea.
I started by sketching out the composition I had decided on, then went in with an orange wash for the warm part of the painting, and a blue wash for the cool part of the painting. Then I added lights and darks in my cool and then my warm, and then went back in with contrasting highlights to bring the piece together a little more. I had initially planned on using a lot more modeling paste to achieve a texture more similar to oil paint but in acrylic, but it ended up looking better just using paint and building texture with brush strokes rather than something actually three dimensional. I do wish I had played with perspective more in this painting, maybe doing a completely different angle inside the mirror.
I wanted to use the contrasting color schemes to emphasize the figures and almost make them look foreign and uncomfortable in their environment. In the dream I had that I based this painting off of, I was looking in the mirror and I was a middle aged man. It was surprising to see myself that way and this image stuck in my brain. I chose to do an antithetical figure to the man to solidify the theme of identity. I am depicting me as a kid and my possible future. More specifically this piece is about my perception of self. The girl in the middle of the frame is a depiction of how I see myself and the man in the mirror is a depiction of how I think other people see me. I also chose to make them not actual reflections of each other to show a phoniness in both figures. Neither of them are me even if in my head these versions of myself feel so real.
