For my final series, I decided it was finally time to step out of my comfort zone and try something I never had tried before: abstraction. I have always been fascinated by photorealism and achieving apparent perfection in my work, but I have noticed that while this style of painting intrigues me, it also limits me as I begin my career as an artist. I never really considered trying any other style, as I deemed photorealism to be my “thing” before I even experimented with other techniques. Therefore upon deciding on the path I wanted to take for this series, I felt a bit of reluctance and nervousness.
I wanted the focus of my paintings in this series to not only be on the end product, but also on the process that went into creating it. I was particularly interested in marbling and the effect that it gives the paint, but I needed to figure out a way to achieve this same effect with oil paints. In order to do this, I used a mixture of both oil and acrylic paints, and guided them together on the canvas allowing them to intermix and react with each other.
Creating these paintings was very different than the other pieces I have worked on in the past primarily because of the feeling that came along with the process. There is no question that I enjoy painting, but I would not describe my usual tedious process as necessarily “fun”. Therefore this alternative style allowed me to be messy and spontaneous, and made the process of painting a lot more lighthearted than what I am used to. And the aspect that was most appealing to me overall was that in the end, although I coaxed and directed the paint to do what I wanted, ultimately the resulting piece was somewhat out of my control.
The artist that I chose to focus on as a reference for this project is Joan Mitchell. Mitchell was an American artist known for her abstract expressionist paintings. She was one of her era’s few female painters to gain critical and public acclaim for her work, and her paintings can still be seen in museums and galleries around the US and Europe. Her primary medium for painting was oil on canvas, and as stated before, she worked in abstraction, taking inspiration for her pieces in her surrounding landscape, personal relationships, or other major life events. As her painting career progressed over the years, she also began to paint series of works on multiple panels, each single work within the series repeating and mirroring the structure of the others. This was particularly applicable to our final project as we are doing just that: creating a series of works that join together in a common theme.
One other thing I find interesting about Mitchell is that she is said to have stood back from her paintings for long periods of time studying them and intricately planning out each stroke, but she was also then able to approach the painting and make quick, confident strokes. She has an exceptional ability to blend and mix colors that compliment each other, and her strokes are beautiful and sure. All of these details are admirable in a painter, as they show she both has the natural abilities to control the medium and she puts in the critical thought to get her desired message and effect across.
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