In the Style of Liam Alvy

I love Alvy's work because it is big, bold and bright as well as whimsical in a more mature sort of way. I love his use of animals and have had great success when painting animals in the past. Alvy is not afraid to use flat lines but defines his subjects with subtle shaded features and small shadows.

The reason I chose to paint in Alvy's style for this first week is because I love the simplistic and effective narrative he tells in his paintings. I wanted to use simple and almost fauvistically-colored animals on a simple background to create a narrative.

Process

In this painting, I was obviously trying to replicate a similar style to Liam Alvy's work, while I wasn't sure what medium he worked in and his paintings are generally massive, I think I did a pretty good job. I worked hard to replicate a similar background by using wonky lines and very simple shadows, completely without a sense of depth to accentuate a flatness to this piece. The vines were a rather spontaneous addition, however I wanted something to distract a viewer upwards from the snake and into the flamingo. Playing with colors in this piece was quite fun and that's what originally drew me to Alvy's work in the first place. I made sure to use a bright and loud color pallete, making the piece really pop and radiate with a whimsical viberancy.

Ideas

This piece is titled "The Experimental Combination of Thoughts and Objects," and that's pretty much exactly what it is. I was struggling to come up with a composition that was truly my own and so I started to look around my studio, where I noticed an empty Italian ice container and a large, almost Greek-style vase. I almost sub-consciously wove these into my sketches where I was still struggling with animals. I landed on a snake and a flamingo. I have been painting this snake for about a year now and similar style snakes have found their way into my sketchbook, so I wanted to try painting it in a more whimsical fashion. The flamingo is my default subject because they are such odd creatures and I love their playful yet almost unnecessary flamboyance. There is no scale in this painting and that's the point, as I found nothing in this composition stuck out to me as more important than another during the initial sketching phases.