Acrylic Painting

Project Challenge:

Thoroughly investigate a contemporary painter and their work, become familiar with how and why artists create paintings. Create both a presentation on the artist and a painting that demonstrates a connection to the work of your chosen artist yet utilizes subject matter of your choice.

Reflection

This painting looks at a woman with a fearful look on her face, holding an older telephone close to her ear. The cord, which is connected to the holder in the back, is wrapped around her neck. Connected to the holder by a charger cord is a modern day phone. The phone is placed above the holder on a different shelf. The background is what I can only describe as a cloud of different colors, mostly red, but they are not blended colors, mostly.  In the background, there are five red eyes looking straight at the woman. I painted this using acrylic, and different gloss mediums that helped to prolong the time I was able to use the acrylic. At the time I was coming up with ideas for the painting, I had thought that I was perhaps hacked, and ended up locking myself out of my phone number in an attempt to protect it from hackers, and even though it was a very traumatic experience, it was very inspiring to me. Stephen Shearer, the contemporary artist whom I based my work off of, does a lot of his paintings based on his own suburban youth culture of heavy metal, and to me, the youth culture of our time is technology. Cyber security being the only thing on my mind at that moment, it worked out perfectly. In this piece, I hope to express the way technology has almost taken over with the way the cord wraps around her neck, and that it will continue to keep growing with the new phone connected to the old one. I also hope to convey that the dangerous side of technology allows you to put your whole life on display, and have people always watching. That sounds incredibly creepy, but I mean it in the sense that nothing is hidden on the internet. A lot of my goals as an artist are to work with new subject matter and also to expand my portrait painting abilities, and I think that this helped in that sense a lot. I certainly worked on my portraiture, and I had never really drawn old phones like that before, or thought of how to handle my background with a framing piece that emphasized the woman. This was an interesting project that helped me to explore what color meant in paintings, and how I could use it effectively. It was also interesting to take inspiration from another artist, but make it still entirely your own piece. Going forward, I would like to explore abstract colors more, as this was really interesting to work with. Overall, I had a lot of fun with this project, and although it is not a work that I would point out as one I am most proud of, I think it turned out well in the end and helped me explore other people's motivations and ideas behind their work.