Chinatown #7

Sustained Investigation #8

Acrylic Paint

7.5 x 10

This is my 8th Sustained Investigation where I painted Chinatown in Boston using acrylic paint. My inquiry question is "How can I use color and texture to concentrate on the emotions of landscapes?" I have gone to Chinatown every year, It's the one place where my family and I can go to our favorite dim sum restaurant, go next door to get some boba, and then go across the street to buy groceries at the Chinese market to bring home. I consider myself to have grown up in this area because as I got older, my younger cousins and I finally got the freedom to roam around the streets of Chinatown ourselves where we got to explore our own favorite restaurants and cafes. It's like a home away from home, very comforting, and gives me a warm feeling inside, especially because this isn't a place I can find in Maine. For this project, I decided to go with a warm color palette to match that warm and comforting feeling I get in Chinatown. I used a variety of oranges and browns as well as some neutral gray to balance the painting out and made the arch a bright red to also bring out the popular symbolization of luck, joy, and happiness that the color represents. I also added Chinese lanterns that are scattered across the scenery to bring out some more culture in the painting, which I was able to reference off of from photos. I don't know how to write in Chinese, but I was able to replicate most of the words from the reference photo onto my art, and although I didn't think I did a good job, my mom told me she could read it. Overall, this piece is the more peaceful and uncluttered environment of Chinatown in Boston, but the warm colors I used to bring out the sense of conformity I was trying to give. After painting the ground gray, I saw how out of place it looked compared to the rest of the painting with the red, orange, yellows, and brown. I wish I made the gray more of a gray-brown color and add that warm vibe, but I also think it contrasted with those warm colors well. The bright red arch really pops out which was my intention because It's basically the only thing that is all red, and I shaded the highlights and shadows with darker reds/lighter reds to still match with the rest of the architecture. I am really happy with this piece because it is close to my heart and also brings some of my cultures into a project, and If I were to revise this, I definitely would spend more time with the buildings to make them look more realistic because I think that would strengthen the whole piece overall.