"Heart of Stone"
Acrylic on canvas. 16"x20". 2018. |
Project 6:
Making this piece, I continued to develop my mastery of acrylic painting and began to experiment with finger painting. This is one of very few paintings I have done on canvas, and I find myself needing to use a lot more paint than I'd like to fill in the texture of the cloth. Using my fingers and the heel of my hand to apply paint came from a need to have the clouds aper both soft and crisp. This piece was inspired by a painting by Sylvestre Evrard. Evrard was able to make a very damp and featureless landscape very dramatic by putting a lot of color and movement in to the sky. The piece is also inspired by the work of Frida Kahlo, speaks volumes through the landscapes she puts behind her subjects. I gained new knowledge of the Venus of Willendorf doing research for this piece, as I wanted an image of mother divine that was archaic. The piece began with the figure and the Venus. the landscape evolved around them. I put a hill below the Venus to emphasize her, and added choppy water to reflect the emotional state of the figure. I then shaped the land across the water to cradle the figure, drawing the eye from the Venus down to the man. The sky was the last piece and it is where I let myself loose. I just stuck my hand in the paint and swirled it around until I felt that the landscape looked alive. I will add red to the skin of the figure when I feel called to do so. If I could do it again, I would do the sky first and work down just to see if that makes the process any more neat. This painting links visually to my other pieces because the focus is on a lone man in the wilderness. The pieces links to others thematically because it portrays the nuanced emotions of men. My theme is the Sacred Masculine and my body of work is a visual study of what it means to "be a man". |