Independent Project

To bring the first semester to an end, our final unit was art history. For this art project I was assigned an artist to research and learn about outside of class. The artist I was assigned was Albert Bierstadt. Bierstadt, was apart of the Hudson River Art School. This movement was landscapers painting in the stye of romanticism. As apart of this art history unit we were instructed to create an independent project inspired by our assigned artist, and another artist we studied in class; I chose Van Gogh. The reason why I chose Van Gogh was because I wanted to do the landscape drawing, but adding components from the post-impression style, such as, lots of vibrant color. The materials I used were acrylic paints, and I painted them on a canvas. Bierstadt painted mountains in almost everyone of his paintings, so I decided to incorporate mountains into my painting. Next, I wanted to have stars in my painting like Van Gogh's in Starry Night. As for incorporating my own voice of creativity I thought having a body of water that reflected the sky would complete my "artist inspired" project. The thing I struggled with the most with this project was the shading of the paint in the reflection of the mountains. The reason why this was so hard was because I had to keep layering the paint so it would be dark enough, but not too dark. My favorite part of my painting is the texture of the mountains. I spent a long time layering different lighter colors on the top of the mountains, and darker colors on the bottom of the mountains. Overall, I am happy with the end product of this painting. I really enjoyed learning about an artist and then putting my own spin on what I learned.