As usual, I decided to corner myself into painting something demanding with an impossible deadline for my next project. I put together nine 8 x 10” canvases and painted them with acrylics from start to finish, in a very realistic manner. Even though the final product is very commercial looking, the idea behind it is based on a contemporary style concern.
The idea was to exploit photographic close up images as ways to describe and define an object (or a concept) without having just one angle capturing the whole object. You could say this painting is about the whole being more than the sum of its parts and say each picture implies the subject's polysemous nature. Or you could just say they’re pretty roses...
Either way, I purposely tried to get angles that allowed me to at least throw off the untrained eye a little bit. I tried to compose each one of these images like abstract paintings so if they were ever shown individually, they remained a little undefined. Given the fact that I was not very sure about what I wanted from these pictures when I took them in the first place (almost three years ago), I can say I’m very happy with the way they turned out.
From a technical point of view, I wanted to start pushing myself into painting more realistically with acrylics. I have been conducting research for a contemporary project for the last four years and at one point I concluded realism was a very effective way to illustrate it. This proved to be a golden opportunity to not only finally leave my oil crutches behind but to also experiment with canvas boards, which until now I had never used before.
For this project's album, please