Sustained Investigation #7

REFLECTION:

One thing that has always been particularly interesting to me about Mexican history and culture is the prominence of art in conveying important political messages. Whether it be Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, or earlier Mexican Prints, the art that I found and studied always had deep emotional and provoking messages. When looking through Mexican history, the most appealing aspect of the Mexican Revolution to me was that I knew close to nothing about it. For all of my other pieces, I have known a good amount of information about the cultural and historical context, however I had no idea where to start with this piece. Through my research, I learned about the origins of the Mexican Revolution, including the dictatorship under Porfirio Diaz and the outrage against the incredible wealth gap, and the hundreds of women that took up arms to help keep the revolution alive. These women, called soldaderas (or adelitas in Mexican pop-culture), helped on camps, working as nurses, laundresses, and cooks, and the battlefield, forming battalions that helped to actively fight. Many sources mentioned that if not for these women, the revolution would not have lasted as long as it did. Throughout time and media, these women have become sexualized, their contributions diminished by the common stereotype of the “weak” woman within society. In this piece, I wanted to share their contributions, but also give them back their strength. In the style of a Mexican mural, I worked to show the different aspects and jobs of women on the field: women making long journeys on foot (lower women walking), women on the battlefront (women with rifles), and women working as laundresses (woman in the top right corner). Additionally I wanted to add Mexican symbols throughout the painting: the woman in the top right corner is hanging up the Mexican flag while over it, the eagle is dropping the snake, which represents oppression, while the top woman holding a rifle shoots the snake of oppression. The woman kneeling is a depiction of the virgin of Guadalupe who was a powerful symbol for the Mexican Independence movement, and later became an image for Mexican American women fighting against oppression.

I practiced for this piece in my sketchbook with multiple sketches of my composition to work out positioning. I experimented with different perspectives than what I have done previously (a more head on appearance). During my revisions, I went back in multiple times to revise the faces to make them as realistic as possible, went over the sky again to make it brighter and more idealistic (patriotism), and also make the largest women’s hair longer to make the head and shoulder more cohesive as well as making the edges of the bullet belt darker to make it more dimensional. 

As I was working on this piece when creating the composition for the previous one I finished, this piece helped me to experiment with perspective and different angles. In the IWD Radio Project Piece, I experimented with an overhead perspective which I think turned out really interesting and provided me with a lot more options on movement, mixed media, and composition. Going forward and past this AP Portfolio, this piece has certainly taught me not to be afraid to “go big or go home” with my pieces. Though this piece was very intimidating a lot of the time simply because of its scale and the amount of details I needed to paint with so much precision, it ended up being the most rewarding piece I have done this year. On a large scale, I was able to include so many more things in my composition that might have been obscured or forgotten on a smaller scale. The next piece I am doing is for my final project in chemistry where I am combining chemistry and art: although I am unsure whether or not I want to depict a phenomenon in chemistry versus actually doing research into the chemistry of art, I still have another of the same sized canvas as this piece, so who knows where it will take me…

REFERENCES USED IN CREATION OF PIECE