Sustained Investigation 4

This artwork is part of a sustained investigation series focusing on the question; How can I represent the journey food goes through from field to plate in artwork format? This is a pretty open question if I'm being honest however it leaves so much space for interpretation that the ideas I can connect with it are never ending, and to be honest that was the whole idea, and I think it is finally time for a confession that I need to make. The whole series is heavily inspired by a Vogue article I found years ago about summers in Capri, an Italian island. This artwork is the final installation of the series however, I noticed after painting this that I forgot the chef or the kitchen (La Cucina) and might have to add that at a later date. This artwork is an acrylic painting done on canvas and is one of the more realistic paintings in the series which has previously been much more abstract. It is centered the table cloth hanging out of a broad open window, which can only be in southern Europe, on the table cloth is a spread of plates and dishes of different food with different origins. In the background is another palm tree a reoccurring object in the series, as well as, my own stand out vertical sky. The sky and the window sill kind of blend together unless you really focus or are looking at the piece in person, so I added a thin black outline to define the two. The rooster and grouping of three things is also present in the painting of course as this ties all of the pieces together. The rooster was a challenge to add in this time and for the first time the rooster came as a painting within a painting rather than there as another character. The painting is done on canvas and is 8 inches across and 7 inches high. I painted it in my room with my won acrylic paints and sped up the process with my mom's hairdryer to speed up drying. There was very minimal sketches before creating this pice however much more than the last painting. I'm super pleased with how it turned out and I think it goes perfectly with the rest of the series.

This painting is the final installment in a series which answered the question "How can I represent the journey food goes through from field to plate in artwork format?," and being that I started with the farmer and this is depicting the plate I think I have answered the question. Like I said earlier this whole series was somewhat inspired by a vogue article about Capri in the summer. In the article it shows many different scenes of Italian families eating outside in the warm Capri sun, so I wanted to really capture and show this feeling. The perfect mediterranean feeling of classy-ness while also being island people who take it slow and use what they have and on top of that being Italians with immaculate tastes baked into their blood. I feel like I nailed this in the painting and am pretty proud of it. The painting is the last step of food before being digested in which it restarts the whole sequence, this last step as I figured was the plate. The plate is where the food that the farmer has grown, the vendor has sold and the townspeople who browse the markets have picked out, finally rests. The painting is rather abundant with different plates and I think it looks really good. The rooster was an interesting component to add to this piece and I didn't know how I would add it. I decided to add it as a painting in the room because I didn't no where else it would work.

This piece is more what I'm used to, being that I'm back to my preferred medium of acrylic. I can't explain it but the colors and feeling that acrylic gives me is something that I have not found with anything else. I know that the actual assignment of this piece was to try new things, and I have all along the way so the big new thing I tried for this is to have it be quite three dimensional or at least try to do that. I didn't actually give the room any shadows but I used detail and linear perspective to show the depth within the room. I also felt like I needed to end the series on a bang and I knew that I could do that effectively with acrylic. This painting was rather smooth in process but some challenges I had were proportioning correctly, as well as trying to make things appear correctly linear (if that makes sense). The wall and window sill might appear as if they were originally darker in color and then washed rather hurriedly with a lighter version of that color. And if thats what you thought then you are correct, however that was also the look I was going for, I wanted to make the place feel loved and used and also like it had been around much like all buildings in southern Europe. I am very pleased with how the rooster looks and also the tablecloth. Overall I had a lot of fun on this whole series and I feel like it is defiantly some of my best artwork ever and some is already hanging up in my house curtesy of my mother.