“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”—Virginia Wolf
Phew, I finally can really sit down and blog about my third painting after a long week of being unproductive, running errands (not for my own business) and all. This project follows the “imitation” project that we did a few weeks ago (I will try to blog about it when I put the photos in the computer).
In this one, we used panel as the support, a ground was not a requirement. The initial ideas of the whole piece was based on a quote we found. From there, we were free to do whatever we wanted to express that quote. The most important requirement was that it had to be painted somehow.
I came across Virginia Wolf’s quote and really liked it. As a student in a women institution, the role of the women was mentioned in almost every single class I took. I am really aware of how the women was in the old time especially when their role was not recognized in the society (at least, not as significant).
Anyone who knows me will not be surprised when I started looking for images of flowers to represent the women. To me, flowers are so beautiful and their meanings can be applied to paintings. I especially am in love with the renaissance which explains why a lot of the basic human drawing and the composition in this project were influenced by that time period.
At first, I was struggled with the idea of how to incorporate this quote into a painting. Yes, I love the quote. Yes, I love being a women and will fight for women’s right. But that was not enough for the idea to come up. I knew I wanted a light and airy feeling. I knew I wanted to use flowers’s symbols. Ferns and honeysuckle are the two symbols that I knew would fit into this project perfectly.
Ferns: Sincerity, magic, fascination, confidence, shelter
Honeysuckle: Beauty, fidelit
The birth of Venus—Botticelli
I started sketching all the images of ferns and honeysuckle that I found. I also found one illustration of honeysuckle that I might be able to glue on the panel as a guide. This piece can totally be a mixed media! While sketching the fern, I realized that the woman’s backbone looks like the stems of the fern: very gentle but very stable at the same time. After discussing with my professor about the idea of putting a woman’s back in the picture, we decided that we should give an Identity
to my woman image instead of making her “anonymous” again. To be honest, I was a little scared because I don’t know which image, emotion I should bring to her face. I myself was not trained for drawing human nor painting human. I came back to my history book and looked at different paintings during the Renaissance. The Birth of Venus was the one that had the airy and light feeling that I would like to bring into my painting. Using it as a guide, I was able to come up with a composition that I was happy with after a lot of sketches of different elements: the body, the ferns, the honeysuckle, and the text. Now, all I have to do was to blow the sketch up with a projector and re-sketch on the panel.
Painting a huge panel without a lot of experience was a troublesome. As soon as I laid the flowers down, I realized that I should have done something to the background...put down some colors somehow. Well, the original plan was to leave the panel plain and rustic. It didn’t work that way!!!
I started laying on colors. While working on arranging the composition on the computer, I did try to put some color background so that all the components could bond together. Now that I worked on the panel, I tried to imagine the color I used and tried to remix it with my palette. NOT EASY! I got it to work at the end. With a cloth, I smudge the background so that I could have a light but rustic looking background.
With directional strokes, I added some to create the flows, making as if the figure was being elevated. I really liked the halo effect in the early christian paintings so I tried to create that too.
As you can see in the previous photo, I did not paint around or on the flower illustration which was glued down with the gel medium. This made the painting very unfinished and at its very first stage. Later on, I came back and worked around the flowers to make the background seamless. I also repainted a lot of the flowers, added in the little details so that they could be alive.
Before
After
I worked really fast from glueing down the flowers stage until putting down the fern. It took me only 3 hours to make all that happened. There was the risk of not finishing the project on time and waiting for the paint to dry but I was able to get as much feed back and just put all my ideas into one place at a time. My brain and my arms were tired by the time I got to paint the ferns. I painted everything without looking back at my sketches because I thought I knew this so well and I knew what I wanted very clearly. Reality proofed me wrong. In the “before” photo, you can tell that my fern was heavy, looked like it was just slapped on with paint and lacked of the airy feeling that I was trying to achieve. I knew something was wrong and was confused of how to achieve the small stroke drawing. After consulting with my professor, I learned that I was able to use oil pastel to mix with oil paint (duh, right?). I scraped off the heavy paint I just applied and outlined the fern with pastel (this time, I did use my sketch as a guide!). By the end of the fern, I was able to use only oil paint to paint the small leaves of the ferns. I was happy as a kid getting a treat!
Since I worked under a deadline (I started working on the panel at 8 in the morning and finished at 12. The whole project was due at 12:30!!!!!!!!), I was not able to draw the text on as I planned. My marker requires a dry surface in order to show. I tried to use the cloth to wipe and smudge as much oil away as possible but I still could not put down the last words of the quote which means I would have to come back and reapply when the paint is more drier.
The biggest lesson in the project that I should always remind myself is to start working as soon as I got the sketch done. Yes, I am a perfect procrastinator and I get things done but I will not have time to make a perfect piece by the due date! Also, I am now so much more confident with working with different materials. Oh, and very comfortable with scraping down the paint; I used to hate it!
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