Assignment One: Art 310

You Are What You Eat, 60" by 36", oil on canvas, 2015

Here's the results of my first painting assignment for the term. It was on the topic of the mundane, "the lure of the ordinary." This assignment was to explore the simple and prosaic and express it visually with emphasis on letting the painting start a dialogue with you as you paint (a la Guston).

I thought it would be interesting to paint what I ate during the day/week and place all the food in a pile on the canvas. It started out fairly photographic but soon became indecipherable. I lightened up the colours and began to rework the piles of food using my photo and sketch references but found that my imagination started to take over while trying to build up the piles. I added a few things, took a few things out and the painting became a real dialogue and surprised me at several turns. At one point the painting seemed dead, lifeless without any warning. Since the food piles were taking on an aspect of rotting food, I thought it might pump some life into the picture if I made the colours annoying, unappealing, irritating. The more I tried to make it annoying, the more I was interested in it. I feel like I succeeded in creating something visually interesting that expresses the mundane, and I think that surface quality (which you can't quite tell from the image) is quite nice because the painting is really build up it some places. I'm not sure the painting is visually unappealing but there is a sense of waste, entropy, and decay.

Some of the comments from my prof and other students were: it had a sense of playfulness, visually unusual and exciting, like a lot of tiny paintings within a larger one, there were an interesting use of forms that were not nameable, solid vs. opaque, and some sweet painting. :)