End of Term Reflection

This term was a challenging term but one that I learned a lot about my abilities and the way I approach and think about my artwork. For my theme I would base all my projects around I chose Identity. I worked with both a more personal interpretation of the theme, and a broader interpretation. For my Note cards I chose broad and personal aspects of Identity to work with. When doing the images from images project I used a lot of the methods that I had worked with in mixed media last term. After having taken that class my mindset has changed. When approaching a new art work I don't think to just use pencil or just use paper, I see all the different medias working together to make new textures. I also used some cutting paper methods from last term. For my symbolic still life I decided to paint 3 masks. This was my most challenging project, but the one that I learned the most from. Per usual, I began by sketches on newsprint, I didn't use my sketch book for brainstorming, I worked better on the newsprint. Getting started was tough. But after deciding to just get paint on the canvas I was able to get started with shaping and shading the masks. With this project I was able to let go a little bit and move forward with out a full plan. This is still a challenge for me but doing this painting helped me realize that not only did I really enjoy painting, but I was better than I thought I would be.

This class was a bit of a challenge after having taken mixed media because I was just starting to feel a little comfortable with the freedom of ideas and materials and then in this class it was more concept based.

I still have to work on motivating myself to get work done, and being able to try new things with out a firm plan.

symbolic still life

For my still life I placed together 3 masks to represent my theme of Identity. For my other projects with this theme I had taken a more person approach to Identity, taking aspects of my own life to compare. For this project I wanted to capture the broader theme of identity. The masks represent people covering up their identity, but also having different aspects of their identity that they can put on when they feel like it. To really capture the essence of the masks I decided to paint them. I stretched and gessoed my first canvas. I began by drawing sketches of the masks on scrap paper just to get the shapes right. I then moved to lightly sketching on the canvas. This became a stressful and very frustrating. I decided that I just needed to start to paint. I began by getting a layer of blue on the canvas that would eventually become the fabric that the masks are sitting on. Finally getting pain on the canvas was encouraging. I proceeded to shape the masks with the paint then worked on getting the shading right. I was feeling pretty good about this painting until I started on the third mask (the one on the left). I could not get the color right, or the shading. It was SO frustrating. This mask was very intimidating and made me hesitant to begin. I worked on the other masks, refining the shading and colors. In the end I'm really glad I decided to paint for this project. I hadn't really painted much before and I really liked it. This painting will probably never get finished, but it was a really great starting point for my painting. I learned that I enjoyed painting and that I could do it better than I thought. It helped me learn to face things head on when I had to just jump in to the painting with out a firm outline.