Christ on the Crossword

This piece is from the spring of '09. Our assignment was to do a collage, and I have a slight obsession with crossword puzzles, so I wanted to depict something with crossword. The idea to have it be Jesus was influenced by two things: first, I felt like I was keeping in the tradition of classic artists by doing something religious, and second, I thought a crossword of Jesus in a newspaper would reference how Jesus has a tendency to "appear" in everyday settings. This was actually very fun to make despite how time consuming it was. I wanted to keep all the little crossword numbers right-side-up, so I'd cut out as big of shapes of white squares as I could and then piece them together. It was kind of like paper Tetris. The black parts are the black squares in crosswords and any large patches of black I could find in newspapers. I painted a black border in acrylic to clean it up, but now I feel like the painted on border makes it feel kinda childish , so I'd probably lose it if I were to hang it.

Mixed Media

Dali

I'm adding some old art that I think is pretty good.

This piece was done in the spring of '09. It's my first woodcut and I'm pretty happy with it. The assignment was fairly open ended, we just had to have multiple layers on the foreground and the background (at least four layers total). I thought it was just four layers period, so I originally just had Dali's face broken down into four different layers. You might recognize that this was adapted from a famous photograph of him, only reversed. So, then I had to go back and add stuff to the background, which were just little images of common motifs in Dali's paintings. They're patterny, and the colors aren't quite right (the green should be much brighter and more visible). I honestly would prefer it cropped, but I might as well have it in it's entirety here.

Woodcut

Ophelia #5

And now we have what Ophelia is famous for: drowning. Ophelia drowning (or about to drown) are the most common images of Ophelia, so I wanted to use a different view point and a more dynamic composition to set mine apart.

The sheer garment she's wearing is problematic since I had to make up a lot of the folds. It comes off as more of a stylization of fabric, in my opinion. It's something new and different, though, so that's good. The bubbles were also very hard to render realistically. I like the idea of things underwater, but my executions are never very...watery. Her face isn't quite right, despite working from a photo-reference. I do like her hair, though.

Watercolor on cold press.

Ophelia #4

The title of this piece is Rue. Ophelia stands at the body of water she will eventually drown in while holding rue and reflecting (literally and metaphorically).

Out of all the Ophelia pieces, this one probably has the most thought put into it. I was reading a lot of essays about Ophelia to get ideas, and many people thought that Ophelia was pregnant. When Ophelia is mad and handing out flowers, each flower has a symbolic meaning. The flower Ophelia gives to herself is rue, which in Shakespeare's time was used for abortions. The word rue also means regret, which I think is an appropriate emotion for this scene. I made a reference to the Arnolfini Portrait in Ophelia's dress in order to suggest her pregnancy.

Watercolor on cold press.

Layers

So this assignment was about layers. We needed something from our past, something from our future, a pattern, and a historical reference. I wanted to incorporate all of these in a coherent and fairly straight-forward way, since I'm not so great at more abstract images. The pattern and historical reference are the stained glass window, the past is me as a kid, and the future is the piece of origami I'm folding.

This piece is another self-portrait...that just sort of happened by accident this semester. The concept is me as a kid being bored in church (as I always was) and amusing myself. I'm actually glad now that my parents made me go to church, because there were so many beautiful and colorful things to look at and make up little stories about in my head. It was a really good creativity exercise.

Watercolor and ink on canvas.

Self-Portrait #2

This was actually for an assignment where we take an artist we don't like and make a painting about their conceptual territory in our own style. I chose R. Crumb. There are actually things I like about his work, but that 70's pen and ink style drives me nuts.

I think Crumb is best known for his brutally honest depictions of himself, so that was my concept. I wanted to show that there are parts of myself that aren't seen on the surface, and that these parts aren't very pleasant. I wanted to overlay strips of dull, monochromatic color to represent those unpleasant parts. I also wanted the layered paper to show a kind of flimsiness, since I often feel rather flimsy.

I like this piece, even though I don't think I really nailed the concept. In the picture, you can't really tell those three strips are actual physical pieces of paper glued on another piece of paper. And since the effect is lost, I could've just done it in photoshop and saved myself the trouble. I'm glad I did it this way, though. I like making things with my hands. I did have to tweak the middle strip in photoshop, though, since it was pretty misaligned at the bottom.

Watercolor on hot press.

Branching

Another anatomy piece! As you might've guessed, I wanted to draw parallels between the way our veins and arteries branch and how that same branching often occurs in nature.

I really like this piece. I like the way the colors turned out on the tree limbs and all the little details are really fun to look at. The one thing I don't like is how I couldn't get the sky to blend very well at the bottom.

Watercolor on hot press.