Mindless Musings

Alright-y! Here’s my last complementary colors+white painting! And look! I got to blend finally! But really, I thought it was never gonna happen.  For this still life we were supposed to employ the stuff we had already learned (determining value and temperature) but instead of premixing the colors (although I found mixing a range of colors then going from there worked well) we got to mix them directly on the canvas. This painting was to help us really understand how color interacts with itself before we moved on and added more colors.

In honor of Peter Fabergé’s 166th birthday (thanks for the reminder google) let’s take a look at some of his amazing work!  Fabergé was born in 1846 in St. Petersburg to a French family of jewelers.  Fabergé grew up learning about the jewelry business throughout Europe and eventually studied jewelry making in Germany before taking over his father’s jewelry business in 1872.  Fabergé spent his free time working at the Hermitage, the treasury which stored many of Russia’s imperial treasures where he appraised and repaired them.  With his brother Agathon helping him run the Fabergé workshop he began to branch out from the popular jewelry designs and began experimenting with gold and enamels with the help of Mikhail Perhin (the one responsible for actually making most the the eggs).  Czar Alexander III took and interest in Fabergé works and commissioned the first of the famous Fabergé Easter eggs as a gift to his wife in 1885 and soon after was named “Jeweler to the Imperial Court” until the revolution in 1917 when the Czar Nicholas II was overthrown and Fabergé was forced to flee from Russia.  A total of 47 eggs remain although it is known that at least 50 of the Easter eggs were once made. As was stated before Perchin was responsible for creating most of the eggs, while Fabergé himself never made any, he designed many of them. Each egg became more elaborate with time with a “surprise” for each of its recipients which were cleverly hidden within the design. Although commissioned by the Czar, the Egg designs were kept a secret until their unveiling in accordance with Fabergé family tradition.

p.s. the egg seen here is known as the Czarevich Easter Egg and carries the picture of Alexei in a frame in the shape of the imperial family’s crest

My painting midterm! So this is a 30x40 self portrait done in the complements blue and orange, and also white.  For this painting we obviously had to deal with the larger format, but also we were supposed to explore working with what colors we could make when mixing blue and orange.  Also it is a nude self portrait, so you had  deal with yourself as the artist and the model and how you are constantly moving and painting (or how your legs cramp up from sitting in the same position for 8 hours) This was a chance to step outside your comfort zone and made you really think about the composition and what you want to be seen.  Sometimes less is more!

                                       Katsushika Hokusai 

Hokusai was born in Edo (nowadays Tokyo) in 1760 and is most famous for his series of prints The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji as seen here represented by his most famous print, The Great Wave of Kanegawa.  Hokusai began his career with woodblock prints, which was a popular technique at the time because it was cheap and easy to reproduce, but later was influenced by western art his own distinct style emerged.  Hokusai is well known for being one of the first to use the artificial European color Prussian blue in Japan (its that nice deep blue color of the wave).  His subject matter initially reflected what was popular during this period, Ukiyo-e subjects before eventually turning towards focusing on nature and the everyday life in the country.  Ukiyo-e art shows people associated with the pleasure districts of Edo, Kabuki and No actors, geishas, courtesans, and prostitutes.    Hokusai was also very skilled at drawing having illustrated many graphic novels that became popular in Europe as well as a painter who was commissioned to make many beautiful folding screens.  Hokusai did not reach fame until later in his life, but once his career took off he did amazing work and continued it until his death in 1849.  As Hokusai himself said, “At seventy-three I learned a little about the real structure of animals, plants, birds, fishes and insects. Consequently when I am eighty I’ll have made more progress. At ninety I’ll have penetrated the mystery of things. At a hundred I shall have reached something marvellous, but when I am a hundred and ten everything I do, the smallest dot, will be alive.”

and back to painting! and now there’s color! So this uses only three colors, the complements, blue and orange, and also white.  Still no blending but soooooooon.  this painting starts us into the second phase of my painting class where wee focus on not only value, but temperature! When i look back on this piece i rather like the composition in, but the shading on the ball is pretty generic(oops). but oh well it was great to break out of black and white!

okay so i’ve uploaded a bunch of my paintings so I guess it about time I put up some thing a little bit different.  This is the first piece I made for my Non-Traditional Approaches to Drawing class, which is essentially mixed media with an emphasis on drawing. for this class we started off with very traditional media and then began to build into using and combining non traditional drawing materials that  really makes you question what drawing begins and ends. but before we get into all of that here’s project 1, combine three images of our choosing by transforming and distorting them.  my three images were the title from the book, The Help, a circuit board, and a woman in a head scarf.  Can you find her face?