FA Portfolio: Second Painting Progress

 For my work this week, I decided to begin by staying in a fixed place, and rapidly drawing all of the interesting people that I see. I did something similar to this in the past, however the renditions were used for a different purpose, more as material for the per-established content. This time around I wanted to let the people and their stories stand on their own a bit more.

I sat on a bench on St. George, and gave myself a two hour time limit. Part of this was for scheduling purposes, but also I knew from past experiences that if I did not limit it in some way, I would be fine to do it all day. In that time i drew about 4 pages of the people that most caught my interest. I decided to paint the figures on canvas with an indent in it to manifest the different perspectives that people bring to each other, or have within themselves. The figures change when viewed at different angles.

Due to the rushed nature of sketching these moving targets going about their own business, The sketches can at times be exaggerated, with some influence of my own interpretations; reflecting what I find to be one of the parts that makes it so fun to do, which is speculating on or creating the life story, or just the story of the day for each passing figure. I painted them in grey scale acrylic on black canvas. After making progress, I had thoughts of perhaps adding color or doing it ink on paper instead. I do not feel this piece is resolved at all yet.

This week's reading focused on the art never seen: the ideas that never materialize, the ones that go unfinished, and the messages that never get conveyed as intended. It tackled the issue of apprehension in the art making process and suggested that the extent of these struggles may be unique to "our age". Here is something that I have been thinking of recently. Artists farther in the past painting portraits, or still life that needed to say nothing more, or a set of classical subjects that were expected, stories repeated.

Imagine Finding Me
1985 and 2005, Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China

This week I am inspired by the artist Chino Otsuka. I was looking at her series of photographs where she was inserting herself as she was presently into old family photographs or herself. I was interested in the idea that the past you becomes removed and is like a separate person, and through the lens of who she is now, is in a way re imagining the story of the photograph, putting a piece of her new self into it.

http://chino.co.uk/index.htm