Sustained Investigation #3

REFLECTION:

This is the first piece that I have done in a more modern time period, the Abortion Caravan taking place in the 70s. Because of this, such as the many social movements of the time, the style of art showed a breakaway from the “norm”—a desire to explore new concepts and inspire creative individuality and freedom. In this piece, I ended up doing a lot of research about the Canadian Abortion Caravaners who rode from Vancouver to Ottawa in protest of anti-abortion legislation, ultimately chaining themselves to the gallery chairs while parliament was in session and being successful in the first parliament shut down. I had never heard of these women before and found it very interesting to go back in time to these groups and individuals who fought so hard for rights that are currently being taken away. That being said, like my other pieces, I of course wanted to tell the story of these women while staying true to the art of the time. Since this piece was abstract, I wanted to make sure that certain elements showed the story of these women—the chains represent the ones they used to chain themselves to the gallery chairs, the clock and green roof can be seen on the Canadian Parliament building (the clock is set to 12—the start of a new day, or new thinking), and the fists of the two women form the shape of the symbol used to represent their movement. I used acrylics for this piece, a common material of the time but also a material that is unmoving, much like these women were in their strength and moxie. 

I have never truly attempted a piece in an abstract style before, and struggled a lot with getting the women how I wanted them to look, creating a composition that held true to the style while telling their story, and reconciling with the fact that not everything had to and could be perfect. I spent a lot of time in my book making sure that the elements were clear, and I ended up painting over the right woman’s face many times to get it to a point I was happy with. Additionally, I also went over the colors many times to make sure everything was cohesive and made sense together. 

Although this piece was very fun and also a very freeing experience, I think that my next piece will likely return to a more realistic style. Though I will most likely end up doing more modern style art in the future, I have been increasingly interested in the female scientists of the enlightenment period. Since we are in our Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment unit in European History, we have inevitably been learning about influential scientists like Isaac Newton, Kepler, Copernicus, and Galileo. We have also touched on the fact that women were very much barred from academic settings and were largely relegated to the household. However, there were women who attempted to step into the realm of science. In the light amount of research that I did, I found that there were women who published articles for other women on which chemicals were most effective to mix as cleaning products, there were women who were important scientific illustrators, and there were women who did make it into the scientific community but are unrecognized. Obviously I need to do a lot more research into this topic before I come up with a composition, but I think that it would be a very interesting piece. I think that I will end up returning to oil paints for this piece because, although I found myself frustrated with my lack of knowledge on how to use them in my previous painting, I also found myself very frustrated with how quickly acrylic paints dry. I am overall happy with how this piece turned out and hope to one day return to abstraction with a more open mind!