Style 3

A confusing combination, with hints of George Condo and Cubism...

I have always had an affinity for anything Picasso, yet his cubist era is not one of my favorites, I wanted to push myself here buy painting something in a more "cubist style" especially using very dry brushes and square brush patterns. However once I had painted the trees and had outlined it, something about it reminded me of George Condo and so I painted the flamingo in a style similar to how I would picture Condo would paint a flamingo.

Process

This was a fairly stressful process this week. I had no outline for myself and one night just went out and started painting with no ideas or even sketches down yet. I did however nail down cubism as my overall theme and went from there. I initially painted a "cubist" background if you can even call it that, by using very dry brushes, painting my layers down while the paint was drying and also making my brush strokes in square or rectangular patterns. This is especially seen in my tree trunks. But once I painted the background I decided to do something I've almost never done before; paint outside the "boundaries." This almost instantly made the piece more dynamic in my mind. Then I added in the flamingo making sure it was a bright pop of color, as well as making the viewer really scratch their head. "Is that really a 2 necked-3 headed flamingo?" Yes. Yes, it is. Finally, I added a clear gloss finish to make it shiny, because frankly I just like my paintings shiny.

Ideas

As I painted I kinda got ideas for how I wanted this piece to look and behave. For example I immeadialy took the tape off after painting the background and let the rest of the parts ooze out of the frame. When I painted the flamingo I really wanted to have something that took the viewer a little off guard, such as the flamingo with two beaks on one head. This was the Condo aspect of the piece, trying to make the subject and viewer relationship kind of uncomfortable.