elba-dart1120

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Final Expansive Painting

Left: Alphabet Soup by Elba Obregon (2020)

Right: Flame Tree, Plume Smoke Bush and Lamb’s Wool by Anna Kristensen (2012)

For my final expansive painting, I wanted to focus on how it is possible to make reductive paintings into expansive paintings later on. The canvas of my expansive painting is actually the experiment I used when I was working on my reductive painting. I had originally focused on the sunset paper clipping that is in my original assemblage, and reduced that into geometric shapes. Once I reduced the water, sun, sky, and clouds into rectangles, I had a completely new perspective on what the sunset from my original assemblage could look like when I looked at it through different lenses. 

With that in mind, I wanted to use that reduced painting to create my expansive painting, and see just how much more I could push myself as an artist to work with the resources I have to create something new. In my expansive piece (pictured above) I used letters from the words in my assemblage to create an alphabet-soup-like representation of all of the words in the original image. I liked that it is not obvious what words any of the letters come together to form, as I believe it adds whimsy to the overall painting. Also, in my original assemblage, there was a heavy presence of nature spread throughout the piece. In my expansive painting, I didn't want to lose that, which is why there are large leaves and flowers in the piece. Furthermore, because I already had a colorful base to work off of, figuring out the other colors I wanted to add to the piece allowed me to think about how the use of color can work to expand a painting by making the artist think about how brighter colors may make a a painting seem more expansive and loud, while more muted colors may be useful in the reduction of a painting. 

As far as artists who inspired me throughout the expansive painting process, I was drawn to Anna Kristensen’s Flame Tree, Plume Smoke Bush, and Lamb’s Wool because of the artist’s use of vibrant colors. The use of red and blue specifically provided great contrast to this painting and the way the artist layered paintings over others (or at least gave the illusion of layering) was something that I wanted to incorporate in my own piece. 

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*Final* Reductive Painting

Left: Carmen Herrera, A City (1948)

Right: Elba Obregon, Fortune Cookies (2020)

For my final reductive painting, I decided to follow in the style of Carmen Herrera and complete a geometric interpretation of a part of my assemblage. I focused on the three fortune cookies because I was so intrigued by their shape and I wanted to explore what it would look like to reduce them to solely geometric shapes of semi circles and triangles. It almost felt like the skeleton of the fortune cookie which is the concept I decided to run with for my reductive painting.

The painting by Herrera that most inspired my final reductive painting is A City, (1948). What I loved about this painting is that, as someone from New York City, I immediately knew that her image was of a city skyline because it was informed by my own lived experience, and my familiarity with the visual of a city sky line at night. In a similar way, I hoped that my reductive painting would be able to do a similar thing of “ringing a bell” for those of you who already saw my original assemblage, and then could recall the image of the fortune cookies even though this new painting is technically just shapes.

Playing with the idea of memory and how the brain connects shapes to things that are familiar to us was an intriguing experience for me as a painter, and hopefully a unique experience for viewers of my reductive painting. When it comes to art, interpretation is in the eye of the viewer, so it makes sense that when we see something that is not obvious or clear, we try to make sense of it in our brains with things that we do know. (Think: Trying to make shapes of clouds as kids!)

Finally, I want to speak a little more about why I chose the details I did for this piece. First off, the pink background was meant to emulate the pink color of the paper from my original assemblage. I did not want to change this as it was already a solid color that did not draw attention away from the fortune cookies themselves. Secondly, I debated whether or not I wanted to paint the entire semi-circles black or if I wanted to leave areas where the white and pink could be seen. I ultimately decided to do the latter as I wanted the painting to look like the skeletons of fortune cookies (if they had one), to truly reduce it as much as possible. Lastly, I decided to round the edges of the canvas because I wanted the painting to resemble the piece of paper in the original assemblage. This also unexpectedly emulated Carmen Herrera’s A City which also features rounded edges.

To conclude, completing a reductive painting was a great learning experience that taught me to rethink what it means to be “done” with a painting. I really had to pull myself away from this painting because my natural inclination was to add more details and cover as much canvas as possible, but I am really happy I could acknowledge that my work on the piece was done because I am really happy with how it turned out, and it is probably my favorite piece to date.

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Assemblage part 2 reductive experiment:

For my reductive painting experiment, I decided to focus on a specific detail of my assmeblage, that being the sunset in the top corner. While the original sunset has more detailed water, clouds, and sun, my reductive experiment uses rectangles to interpret the piece. Using geometric shapes as opposed to focusing on creating a more detailed replica of the sunset allowed me to see the subject in a new light and really allowed me to focus on the colors of the piece as opposed to the more intricate details. Moving forward, I hope to convert this reductive painting into my expansive painting as I believe it tells a story about how a reductive painting can be re-worked into an entirely new piece. After speaking with Clare, she encouraged me to pursue this experiment and hopefully create an expansive work that tells an even more unique story. I have not yet decided what elements I will be adding to make this piece more interesting and embellished, but I am grateful for the other artists on tumblr and in our class who are great examples of interesting collages and pieces of art.

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Assemblage part 2

For the second part of this assignment, I used dual ended watercolor markers to paint/draw my original assemblage. I chose to use watercolor markers because of the color selection that was made available to me by using that material. While I could have mixed my acrylic paints, finding exact color matches would have tedious and difficult. Using the watercolor markers allowed me to focus on the piece itself and make it come to life as accurately as possible. Because of the small design details, using regular acrylic paint would have potentially been wasteful seeing that some colors are used only sparsely throughout the assemblage. Exploring the use of watercolor markers and the technique of making the painting of my assemblage look as collage-like as possible was rewarding and enjoyable. The smaller side of the dual ended marker allowed me to add small details like the lettering that would have been more difficult to do with acrylic paint. For my next paintings, I have yet to decide what element I will be focusing on and what element I will be expanding. With these paintings, I plan on using acrylic paint as it will be a more concentrated thing I will be painting.

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Assemblage part 1.

I used pages from an old 2018 Ban.do brand planner to create my assemblage. I decided to display this first part on colorful bed sheets that had a similar color scheme as well as a similar chaotic nature to the assemblage itself. Making this assemblage was very calming and it came together in a way that embodies what I needed to hear right now: that this moment will pass and there are “pink skies ahead”. Using a planner meant that my materials all revolves around the theme of “time”, which felt especially fitting during these days where time feels like it is moving and an exceptionally slow pace.

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Post a painting you found on the blog “Contemporary Art Daily” describe why you chose it and how it deals with colour and tone

I chose to focus on Sofu Teshigahara’s piece because since my last assignment, I have been really drawn to art that centers shades of blue. In this image we see that the walls of the room are painted a solid blue color that is the same along all of the walls except for the roof. The walls being this color feels almost consuming as a person standing in the room would be surrounded by this color, almost like they are in the ocean, the sky, or just generally a very very blue place. As far as the tones in this piece, because of the greenery as well as the dark colored structure in the middle, this piece feels very earthy. By fore-fronting earth tones of green, dark brown, and dark gray/slate, this piece gives off the impression that earth tones were the inspiration. When the earth tones are placed on the blue blackdrop, one cannot help but think about a connection to nature or the larger world itself which may be what the artist was working towards in this work.