Sustained Investigation # 4

REFLECTION:

When learning about the scientific revolution in my AP Euro class and how women were not allowed in scientific academies, it got me wondering whether or not women did actually have a role in the scientific world. Through a lot of research, I was able to find that women in the domestic sphere often did things with medicine and cooking, such as fermentation & preservation, that were very comparable to the experiments that men were doing in scientific institutes. I especially found it interesting that all of these processes can be found in cookbooks from the 1600s, a way for women to pass this knowledge amongst themselves. For this piece, I spent a lot of time looking into the different art styles of the time. Since the Scientific Revolution was a continuous time period which stretched over multiple eras of art, looked for the style which synthesized elements from multiple artistic styles. I ended up settling on Baroque art which came after both Renaissance and Mannerism, and took the realism and emotion from Renaissance art and the drama from Mannerism. In this piece, I attempted to imitate the baroque style. I spent a very long time on my compositions, and eventually settled on one that takes the baroque element of “looking into” a painting, and showed the woman holding up a flask and holding up a book. The viewer sees the reflection of the woman through the neck of another beaker. With my color, I tried to capture the smoothness of the portraiture using oils, the most common material of that time, and also the dark colors that were often used by creating a dark atmosphere with the background. 

Apart from restarting completely, this piece was a lot of experimentation with new materials such as linseed oil. This required me to watch a lot of videos on how artists use oil mediums in portraiture. I worked hard to make her skin realistic and warm, and to make her features anatomically correct. I ended up going back multiple times to fix the shape and shade of the woman’s eye. Additionally, I spent a lot of time on the neck of the glass beaker: I had never really painted glass before, so this required a lot of attention to detail and revising areas that made the glass look unrealistic. 

If I learned one thing from this piece, it would be that I should never be afraid to start over and scrap something if I am truly unhappy with it as it often results in a piece I am far more happy with in the end. It was very enjoyable to play with new oil painting mediums, and I think it benefitted me well in the end. Although I am not sure specifically what group/people I am going to make my next piece about yet, this piece has motivated me to take risks in my art. I would like to return to a more modern time period (1800s or 1900s? This is not entirely modern…) and possibly work with watercolor. I have been looking at a lot of Winslow Homer watercolor paintings from his time in the Bahamas, and I think it is very interesting how he used his art to tell stories of the people living there. I am also thinking about returning to a more abstract style, but don’t quote me on this! However, I will most certainly be returning to oil painting as experimentation in this piece forced me to learn a lot, which I am of course grateful for.