Sustained Investigation #1

The main idea that guided this artwork was figuring out a way to portray a certain emotion or feeling through the song Something in the Orange by Zach Bryan. I chose this song because I really like it and when I listen to it a paints such a distinct image in my mind of longing for someone that you can't have anymore. I also like that this song talked a lot about the color orange, which isn't typically a color associated with sad feelings. This was refreshing to me to see a color that is normally associated with happy feelings portrayed in a different tone and I wanted to find a way to visualize that. The song is about a man longing for a girl and in it are the lyrics "Something in the orange tells me you're never coming home with this work I experimented with how to visualize that lyric.

This work was made with acrylic paint on watercolor paper. I chose to use acrylic paints because I wanted the image to look messy and desperate. In the song, something in the orange the singer is so desperate for this woman that he cannot have it and says "to you I'm just a man to me your all I am" which shows the amount of desperation and longing he has for the women. The messy brush strokes and splotched colors were a way for me to portray this desperation which Is why I chose acrylics. I also wanted to be able to make a lot of different oranges because I wanted it to seem as if the people were melting into the orange and being separated by it.

For this piece, I did some research by creating a Pinterest board with some inspiration photos. I made some sketches and expeirmently with mixing elements from a lot of my inspiration photos. Eventually, I came up with a basic sketch and then decided how I wanted to do the colors. I knew I wanted the majority of the painting to be orange so I mixed a lot of different shades of orange to create a sense of a sky and an ocean-like surface. I wanted to show the people almost melting into the ocean and create a tone that shows the people in the painting may never be with each other again.