Project 2: Artist Emulation

Van Gogh Emulation

I really enjoyed this project for many different reasons.  First of all this project helped to give me a new understanding of the challenge it takes not only to copy an artists painting, but to go further and really understand an artists style.  The ability to understand their tendencies and then to actually take that knowledge and apply it to your own work was an incredibly interesting experience for me. It really helped me to understand just how challenging painting can be especially if you do not get to fully rely on your own styles and intuitions, but instead have to think, what would your artist do.  Van Gogh was very surprising in that most of his paintings were inspired by personal events in his own life as oppose to movements in the art world.  Van Gogh focused on short strokes of color that when seen together created one object, but separately were just strokes of color. Van Gogh didn’t necessarily mix colors, but instead just put two different colors next to each other so when seen together they looked like the color Van Gogh wanted.  He did many different studies of different scenes, but I always think of him as being best know for his landscapes so that is what I decided to focus on for my final.  I really enjoyed the short lines in different parts of my final piece, because I felt it did a really good job of coming together to create the final scene and it gave it more of an interesting point to draw your eye to. This is a style that I might try and bring into my works, not for the whole piece but for different parts of it.  While I tried my best to incorporate the idea of not mixing and just putting two colors next to each other to create one color it just doesn’t fit my style.  I like to mix my colors and work to get as close to the color as I can and this style of Van Gogh’s didn’t work for me.  I still like putting different colors nest to each other I just like it better when they are a little more neutral so there is only a slight difference between the two colors. Overall this project taught me how to take another artists style create your own study in the artists style.

Project 1: Representing the Still Life

My Intentions

Originally when looking at the still life I was really inspired by the hook hanging from the rope.  The texture of the rope intrigued me, and something about the hook hanging there from mid air caught my attention.  As I continued to study the still life the chain caught my attention and much later I noticed the wheel.  I decided to use ink as my medium because in one of the first quick contours we did as a class I used ink and loved the way I was able to create the objects on the page.  I started with the chain because I liked the way the chain could carry some of the weight of the page.  Having it start on the page but fall off the page created an interesting composition, because the object had a starting point but no ending point.  Then to offset the chain I added the rope and hook that had originally intrigued me.  When I had successfully created these two pieces on the page I realized I needed something light in the background to help offset the darker two objects and also to help draw the eye away from the lower left hand corner where the hook and the bottom of the chain met.  Once I added a portion of the wheel to the lower part of the composition the overall composition entirely improved.  As a last impulse I decided to add the splats of light ink in the background so that the white wasn’t quite so bright and helped soften the eye to the rest of the image.  The formal decisions I made were the use of a completely black and white scale.  I focused a lot of my energy in this piece on the texture, by creating tiny brush strokes that came together to help form the final object.  I also played a lot with light and dark on my page, with parts of the piece very white like the background, while other parts were very dark like the highlights in the chain or hook.

On my second piece I didn’t really have any intentions.  I had a couple extra days and wanted to just do a fun quick piece with the free time.  I used ink and created the bolts, the jar, and another triangular object.  I didn’t really like the outcome of the ink so I decided I would try using pen, which I had never used before.  I used different thicknesses to outline different shadows in the three objects which really helped to make them stand out and look unique.  I focused mainly on the pen and how to use different amounts of pressure on the pen to outline different values.  The formal decisions I made were to stay in the black and white scale and to play with the lights and darks.   I continued to study texture just instead of small lines to create texture I outlined values.