It's A Boy

Well, this was a pleasant change from all the wall textures and chain link fence. I'm generally more happy with the figure's upper body than I am with the legs, but overall I'm quite pleased with the results given that it was rendered almost entirely from my imagination (hence the inconsistent lighting effects).


It's a strange thing, but I suspect that all the technical emphases of our first year drawing and painting classes instilled a reliance on photographic references that I haven't been able to shake. Whereas prior to art school I could generally just draw freely from mind. I guess that's why it felt so nice to kind of ad-lib this little section (with more to come).


I still have to render about a dozen or so intertwined trailing characters in translucent glazes so this painting is far from done. Originally, I planned to do three panels, but I'll be fortunate to complete two. Volume of work is my biggest concern right now but I'd rather hand in one excellent painting than two or three half-assed pieces.

Heavy Lifting

Behold the labours of the past two months. A bit depressing considering how little way I've come and how far I've yet to go. But it is the most layered and detail-intensive painting that I've ever attempted.






You can follow my overtly pedantic process from the buildings in back to the foreground wall to, most recently, the nightmare that was the chain-link fence. Incidentally, I absolutely hate rendering architecture.

p.s. For those that know it, yes, the imagery was referenced from La Cancha. I tried adding the "Ole" graffiti but it looked pretty terrible.

Mission Statement

So I'm about one third of the way through my final semester at art school and desperately trying to bring my final body of work up to speed (hence, the lack of posts -- sorry!). This project is basically a thematic continuation of last semester's work, dealing with issues of loss and emotional displacement in the context of the transition from youth to adulthood.

Preliminary sketch on wood panel

Basically, I'm painting a series of panoramic narratives, each of which will depict a boy with a soccer ball conquering a legion of his own imagined foes. It's a pretty clear and shallow reflection of my infatuation with the recently ended World Cup, and I am desperately hoping that the final product won't look like a Nike ad, but the subject matter is both personally relevant and visually accommodating to the type of language that I want to use.

My life, circa 1991

The one condition I did impose was to confine all of my compositions to a strictly two-dimensional plane -- not as a conscious decision, by any means, but more in how I instinctively visualised the idea. I suppose it harks back to memories of my boyhood iconography: living in a two-button world where the only driving factor was to get Mario from the left side of the screen to the right. That's something that wouldn't make sense to a lot of my more academic teachers, but I look at these old NES games and see a beauty in that kind of honest visual simplicity, and I look at my recent work and see evidence of this aesthetic lineage.

Photo taken in Boston Commons (01/10)

I also think this framework is a perfect vehicle to explore the dynamics of human movement, which is probably a more longstanding artistic interest of mine. As someone who typically frames only one or two people at a time in an image, I'd like to really explore a more intricate and fluid composition of interacting characters in this series of paintings. Something akin to the complexity of Renaissance painting, which is generally something that I tend to steer clear of.

Nicolas Poussin's "The Battle"

On a more technical level, I'm trying to layer my acrylics in a series of thin coats to produce a well developed transparency effect, what with the juxtaposition of the child's imagined elements against the reality of the physical setting. It's pretty cliche, but one of my bow-down-and-worship-him contemporary influences is the painter/illustrator James Jean. The image below, for example, is a perfect demonstration of the kind of hard-graphic-on-soft-paint look that I want.


As it is, I'm still battling the first of three planned paintings. I've hashed out the basic underpainting and am currently fleshing out the background (something I really, really dislike doing ... rendering architecture). But after uploading them to my computer I realise that all the photos I've taken are pretty terrible. This post is long enough anyways. If you got this far, wow, I'm impressed.

Green Grass And Blue Skies

Some examples of the unconventional sports photography of Hans van der Meer, the primary artistic influence on this semester's major work. His linear composition and emotionally detached narratives are both elements that I would like to emulate in my painting.





As a nice little bonus, looking at this collection of photography has inspired me to shoot for the first time since I returned from the United States at the beginning of the year. I'm currently halfway through yet another roll of good old fashioned Ilford XP2, though I've also got some 200 ISO slide film sitting around waiting to be played with.