Assignment 01 results

January 2013, Oil, oil stick, and pen on canvas, 40" by 40", 2013

Assignment 1: smore hits

After a few more hits :)

Assignment 1: second hit

So this one is making me nervous . . . but in a good way: the what the eff is going on here? and I'm sure I'll understand it later type of way.

Translation painting

The drawings I received to translate made me think of the question of which is more expressive, high representation or cartoony image? I'm going to try to depict a battle of sorts between these two. I'm going to pick out the red, black, and predominantly white of the drawings as colours for my painting. I want to experiment with some paint pens (if I can find some) to get that sort of graphiti-esque type of line for some of the cartoony parts. I happened onto a really beautifully ugly neon pinky red doing a cadmium red wash over the gessoed canvas.

Painting 212: Assignment 01

Woot! Start of a new term in painting! Our first assignment is called Translation. Part one of the assignment is to keep a visual journal for one week. We will translate things that we are thinking about, feelings, events, things that we would write in a journal, into drawings. (14 drawings minimum ie. 2 per day). We will bring these drawings into the next class and switch them with another student. We will then translate their drawings into a painting by deciphering the meanings, events, and compositions.
The key for this first part is to make drawings about loaded subjects and keep the meanings ambiguous.
We talked a lot about Basquiat's work. His paintings lend themselves well to the idea of a translating imagery and ideas from various sources and combining them to make something new. Old ideas through a new mind. All ready I'm a little nervous about this one. I'm considering moving away from the pristine, smooth, white canvas and using found wood panels that have texture or some kind of imagery on it with house paints. First of all, I need to find something, and then secondly, how do I do this without being a hack? I'm not interested in making a "Basquiat" but I want to do something that will really take me out of my comfort zone. So the idea to use a unconventional support has something to do with being a foreign object to the class/studio situation. Bricks, bins, doors, windows, suitcase . . . I have to watch it though. I'm not making a sculpture. I'm making a painting. I guess we'll see . . . I don't want to force the issue if it doesn't suit the material I get next week ;)

Poison Oasis, Jean-Michel Basquiat

Painting in 2013 :)

Paint Is Only Skin-deep, 40" by 40", oil on canvas, 2013, by Pete Kohut

First painting finished for 2013. This work is a riff on the idea of shallow and deep. The shallow via cosmetics, embroidery, stained glass, beverly hills fashion photography. The deep via spiritual (stained glass are rosette windows from Notre Dame in Paris, the only building that made me feel like it was a "sacred" place), the colour blue (a nod to Yves Klein), medieval cloisonne (circle of life and nature etc).

Vapid expression, consuming colour and light, arrested, the rich old ladies in "Brazil", melting glass, oozing colours, lyrical abstract linear shapes, contrast of red-blue and green-blue.

Starting the second half of my painting class with Thomas Chisholm next week. Can't wait to see what projects we are going to be working on :)