So I've been working on this painting for a month or so now. Henry gave me a few suggestions, but I'm curious to see what everyone thinks.. Basically, compositionally it's almost there. I need to tighten it up. Peace out. Oh, and it's about 48x60" or so, and it's Oil on Canvas.
6 comments:
very nice! I love the shine on the two largest sets of lips. The one one the bottom right needs more detail. I also like the rectangles, which seem to refer to the pod thing shapes. The only compositional comment I have is to do something with the large white area inside the left lips. Cool thing! Very sexy thing! Hubba hubbas!
ah! i like what you have done with it...nice...i agree with what chester said about the shine...and i think this was something we were talking about before...or maybe that was another painting...but either way it is one of your strong points...light...or something...when this painting is done maybe you should gloss the whole thing...
What is this, me and my brothers say whatever we want to greg blog? Na-uh.
I mean, nah-uhh. That word's impossible to spell. You know the nagh-angh that goes with "oh no you didn't" I mean di-in't. Oh whatEVer.
So chet, you think this painting is sexy? You are confused bro - this painting is supergross and terrifying. It's the disembodied mouths thing - pretty hellish. And I'm not sure semen is sexy.
G - I would normally see this painting executed in really bright colors - a kind of pop thing with an ironic, detached feel. The kind of painting that I usually hate (I think you have to be pretty advanced if you are going to be working in "pop" style - irony is pretty universal now and with the art world fully commercialized, the punch line is kind of lacking). THat's why methinks it cool that you chose to use that umber color yellow - pretty earthy and bio looking. And the fact that you used oil too. I see it as a legitimate and unironic picture of, you know, getting fucked, like fucked-over. Like these mouths man, there's more than one of them, so it's a different thing.
The thing that really isn't working for me is the flowers. I don't like the blue - it's really flat and has no relationship to the rest of the composition in terms of color, and the shapes are still pretty vague. Like, is it part of the pop aspect, or the straitfwd aspect? If it's pop, it should be like a bright electric blue, and the shapes should be like all regular pillow flowers or something. Then it would be an overwhelmingly dark painting. But if it was part of the straitfwd part, maybe you could actually look at some real flowers and really paint them, or at least paint them expressively. That's what I would do. Then it would be real beautiful - the combo of mouths and flowers, pollenization and whatall. Pop icons painted realistically.
So whatev man, that's just my kind of noise.
Crits online tend to be much more onesided than in person...
I think you're right on about the flower shapes. I'm borderline on the getting fucked over idea -- I think of the mouths more as giving than recieving, not that that's clear, but it was my intention. I was thinking of giving it a really obvious title like "exchanging DNA". The flowers were intended to symbolically represent the microscopic elements that you can't see without straight up painting a double helix. However, I think that I would like to go more in the direction of making them literal but painted expressivley like you were saying and make the whole thing about being beautiful. Damn, really good crit -- I need to think more about this.
G
this is what i think of when i look at your fantastic painting : the rolling stones and bosch and darger.
you titled it obscene on the blog, do you really think so ?
they totally look like they are giving rather than receiving. what mood do you think the painting gives off ?
Ha, yea, rolling stones jumped into my head as soon as the mouths got disconnected from faces -- Hadn't thought about bosch but darger's colors are definitely in there.
I guess I don't really think it's obscene, but I figured some people might..
As far as mood, I'm still not sure. There is something sinister about the mouths coming out of the mouth -- like, unstoppable forces of nature. But than at the same time they're giving like you said, and I do see it as, like, flowers growing out of the dirt.
So I think it's about fundemental beauty of mutation and reproduction.
Come to think of it, the mood is very much based on a vision I had of what it would be like to die and come back to life as a goldfish. In the initial moments it would be painful, and than I would except it, and then I would forget my previous life (although I would still be aware of it for a few moments), and then I'm in the water and life starts again.
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