Level two art: term three update.

As of today, which is the second of September, my first art board is completed. Yay.

Ok, so the theme of my board is unattainable perfection and how we tear ourselves apart in the effort of achieving something impossible. This could be anything, from grades to our appearances. Especially in this day and age, it is so easy to get caught up trying to be perfect. From the social media influencers with 'perfect bodies' via Photoshop to some of our peers, who somehow manage to get 100% on everything; its becoming increasingly hard to be happy with ourselves. This unhappiness can lead us to become obsessed with our flaws and try to change them. We try to change what makes us human.

Fair to say, its a viscous cycle.

So, I've planned out all my series, to scale on this page. Little bit nerdy but that's ok. 

Art series one:

Art series one featured roses painted using the principals of positive and negative space. These roses were bordered by vintage mirror/ frames.

The original plan was to have charcoal sketches of mirrors as my series, reminiscent of the style of Kath Kolwitz. After doing the positive/negative space exercise in class, I decided that a rose in that style would be very beautiful and a little bit Gothic, which are both features I wanted to include in my board.

The series ended up looking like this. The roses symbolises beauty, which is one of the many unattainable things we strive for. The wilted rose, while still beautiful, is dying. I thought the dying rose would be an ideal representation of when we take the obsession of beauty too far.

Art series two:

To go with my already depressing theme, we have a lovely series of some woman getting consumed by vines. As ya do. The woman is supposed to be Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty. Beauty is one of those things that we are pressured to have and can quickly grow out of control (like untamed vines, see what I did there?). I used the purple flowers to represent the beauty in this obsession (not how it hurts people, but how it starts off as an improvement then backfires). This obsession gradually grows and over takes the image, represented by the vines having more space in the second painting.

Art series three:

Art series three is an emulation of the African American painter/ quilter Faith Ringold. Faith uses quilting and painting to convey various stories and people. Quilting is one of the major ways stories were passed down from generations in some African cultures are used by Ringgold to create her politically charged artworks. I used geometric shadows/ shapes and stitching to represent her art style.

Art series four:

Ignore the title on the planning page, I swapped some series around. Art series 4 acts as a summary of the first board. The images are of two women in different phases of being consumed by flowers. Thats not gruesome at all. 

they are framed with gold boarders, which links back to my first paintings. Wow, its almost like motifs are useful for ncea art, who knew.

Please excuse the blurry-ness, my phone is a bit odd. The contrast between the dark background and the drastic highlights of the figures represents Artemisia Gentilschi's style, who is one of my artist models. Overall, I am pretty happy with board one.

                   :)