| Beginning Painting (color theory put into practice), taught by Melissa Weinman at the University of Delaware, 1991. Paintings by John Williams. |
| Assignment: Monochromatic still life. Felt compelled to add a landscape to the background; still-lifes seem too still. Wish i had used a picture of a real landscape to go by, but i guess this has a nice mythological/something feeling to it. Kind of like it. Icky line in pitcher due to acrylic drying too fast. Got B+ -- teacher didn't like big 2D signature distracting from 3D effect. Larger |
| Assignment: bichromatic warm/cool color. (The shadows are actually a bit more warm than they look here.) This was about the time George Bush decided to destroy Iraq so i started making this into some sort of war protest thingy but never finished; probably silly anyway. Teacher impressed that i could make a very vertical painting work since they usually feel disjointed. Classmates impressed that i could do it all in acrylic (the original is nicer than this scan); they all used smelly oil paints. Got an A for masterful grasping of value and temperature contrast. My cousin got this painting and used the skull in the bottom to freak out drunk college peoples that would stop by her room. Larger |
| Some sort of boring still life assignment. Think maybe it was to do organic shapes instead of artificial shapes. Got too bored and decided to go into bizarro land. The original looks a bit more carnivorous and dangerous than this scan, i think. Teacher gave me B-, thought it all fell apart. I think it's fabulous. My plant rules! My plant has the power! Tremble and mewl in terror you pathetic beings! Wanted something with more different type of emotion than all the others which were just ethereal beauty and suchlike. Most others were accurate and/or beautiful plantly depictions (like the one below). Was glad to hear classmate say "man I got to get away from this photorealism shit..." Think i had some psychological/physics theorems floating about in the background, but i don't remember. Fun: the person in front of me (who had a really beautiful flowy painting, see exhibit A below) had parents come in and look at all the plant canvases on the wall and jokingly said to her "oh I bet that's yours!" pointing to mine, not knowing that the me who painted it was also in the room and might get offended by the implied low-quality of my fabulous plant unit. Ha! my plant will eat their upper-middle class souls and spit them out of some supernova somewhere else in the multiverse! Sad: so much of my painting has little tiny details that can't be seen unless you're next to the painting. Textures and things... Larger |
| Full color still life (skeleton in a suitcase on a couchthingie). Felt compelled to add landscapey thing again. B due to failure to keep light sources coherent - yellow in bottom corner, white up top, glowy skeleton. This was a large painting and i found it difficult to keep paint at different places wet long enough to blend and balance and things - acrylic axe fell upon neck. I think the bones are haunted tho so their self-illumination is right and proper. Teacher unit liked arrangement. Larger |
| Assignment - take some master's painting and do a complementary color version. Mine is Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (see little picture). Came out pretty good; mom unit has it on her living room wall. Larger |
| Assignment: use very muddy colors that normally wouldn't be worth spittin' on the ground for and make them feel bright and vibranty due to juxtaposition with other muddy colors. Wasn't going too well until i got just the right purplish background at the last minute then magically it became a masterpiece of happy. Also got bored with 2D canvas and made weird 3D contraption. Grandparents have it on their hall wall; i was surprised that anyone but me and other artist types would like it; maybe they liked it as an expression of me. I think this photo is a bit more saturated than the original painting - i tried to make each color as close to gray as possible without losing the color entirely. I really learned from this painting that the secret to alive bright colors has nothing to do with using highly saturated just-out-of-the-tube colors. Some professional artist criticized my stuff at the end of the year, but her art used just-out-of-the-tube saturation so i didn't give a damn about her opinions. (She thought i needed to focus on one particular style and make it mine. no no i say my style is precisely the variation in style; just takes a lot more work to make it good for each type -- more things to master, which i didn't always do too well at in these here paintings. But at least i failed in interesting ways.) Larger |
| Did two quick paintings from a model at the end of the year. One was like 20 minutes and the other was an hour or two i think. Don't remember which is which. I kind of like this one but it fails a bit - needs yellow in the table surface to make it a real place (see little quick touchup thingbob with more yellow below), and ran out of paint before i could finish arfing out the background, with no time to mix more. Chose bichromatic due to much greater difficulty and slowness of full color. I think Griffenshire has this one. Larger, or Detail |
| Decided to do more tricky purple-as-highlight-color painting. Purple is reluctant to serve in this role. Teacher unit didn't think this one was very good, but it was someone else's favorite. I really like most of it except for the ghastly mistake of the too-skinny leg. I get a very powerful interesting feeling from it, so much so that i just demanded that mom unit send it back to me. Feeling doesn't come through too well in scan, and the whole thing could be much better if i'd more time, but oh well. Reminds me of classical Greek things some. Larger, or Detail, or Larger of the thingy below |
| Quick sketch. Larger |
| Self-portrait with nipple and plants in Tacoma bedroom. Larger |
| Final teacher-unit's comments: |
| Final Grade: B+. ...."Your work starts out very strong with your second painting demonstrating a more total grasp of value relationships than the first. Of course, your warm/cool palette issues in #2 are right on the mark, as well. #4, #5, #6 are more problematic and I believe that is because you abandoned your focus on the assigned problems and tried to do something else. Sometimes the results are impressive, as with #6, but also, there's the risk that the results will be disastrous. Please understand that this is beginning painting class and that in my own demanding and structured way, I'm trying to teach basic principles and expecting complete mastery of the principles before students go on. In any case, your final (figure) paintings don't demonstrate the kind of mastery I'm talking about, and I accept that perhaps you want something more and different out of them. Good luck." |
| -- a fine summation. If i ever paint again (which i've just recently had desire to do), I'll probably work more on mastery of fundamentals, particularly 2D/3D design of which i suck at, and full-color, and thingbobs, but it'll also be truly meaningful subjects that are true art and not exercises. This was the only art class that physics-major me could take so i tried to pack much more into it and get much more out of it than just basic color theory. |
| Oh but before i go i should immortalize the Sad Tale in bytes: at the end of the year i photographed everyone else's paintings (as groups and as select individual paintings) while they hung in the art building, but i thought "oh i shall take good photos of mine and not in this building full of florescent lights. So i took mine outdoors with better slide film and allegedly optimal lighting and something went wonky and the slides came out washed out and horrible, and all the other photos of my classmates came out gorgeous and rich and so now i weep with sadness. Painful to have them appear in the same photo album. All paintings have since flown off to relatives and friends about the country and sniffle etc. |
| The class was really good in general and there were many quite beautiful things and it was very good to be surrounded by weird artists at the dawn of Nirvana than to be sitting in stale physics rooms hearing people making interesting points about cosine this and arf that. Oh, also i had a mild crush on the person in the self-portrait below...if you're that there person and find this page in a random search, email me and we can talk about all the things we don't have in common! It'll be perfect! If you're not sure you're you, you also painted the other thing below. |
Jodawi |
john@aetherlumina.com
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