A World, Illustrated

The end of the quarter is almost here, and week nine has been a time for critical evaluation, final touches, and reflection on the broad topic I have attempted to cover through my final project. During Thanksgiving break, I allowed myself time for experimentation and risk-taking, and was tempted to explore the idea of adding two new individual pieces into the mix. (Pictures and details of these attempted pieces can be found in my week 8 studio plan.)  I decided to abandon these new developments for a few reasons. Firstly, time management and project constraints would not allow for the same quality of work to each piece with two more to be completed by the end of the quarter. Secondly, after working on them in the earlier stages of progression, I found that my own personal bias with the new characters/animals I had chosen to depict warped my perception of their form and did not support the idea of the project. Unlike Little Bear or The Angry Beavers I’ve never watched Will E. Coyote or Bambi in depth, and therefore felt indifferent about the stereotypes and symbolic references that these characters imply to many people. That indifference gave me the ability to pull them out of their specific context easier within my work, and view them with a neutral perspective.

On Wednesday of this week, we had our final critique before the show, and recieved some outside feedback given by a guest critiquer from the University of Washington. This was the most intensive review of the class’s entire body of work so far, with fifth teen minutes devoted to each student’s work. Our projects were critiqued as finalized pieces, and included commentary from Nate and Shaw. The first two images of this post are of the paintings before entering critique, the second two are of after critique, with minor adjustments made. During my projects’s review, I was given many helpful points of feedback about composition, figure/ground relationship, content, and areas that need improvement. The composition was noted as similar to photoshop or collage, without much figure/ground relations throughout either painting. Because of this disconnect, the pieces seem a bit too literal, too blunt, or fragmented when theoretically read.

To be honest, I feel that I have discovered my first tastes of how good abstraction might enrich my work after this critique, and have gained acceptance that I have a long ways to go before understanding it fully. I have never taken an art class that has been so immersed in abstraction and contemporary art. Throughout this quarter, I have struggled with many of the theoretical ideas we’ve discussed in class, such as pure abstraction, ingenue vs. genuine art, and subtle vs. literal content. I feel that I have overthought a few ideas throughout this project, and became stuck in my own interpretations of ideas a few times, but those mistakes have helped me reflect on new ways of thinking. When personally reflecting on my own work after receiving feedback, I began to realize how literal and blunt these paintings were, although while making them, I felt that my compositions were subtle and complex. This has reminded me to not get stuck within my own personal vision of what a finished project could look like, because the best content comes naturally and is not forced.

Although this project is too late in its development to change fundamental decisions about the way I chose to paint and think about it, I attempted to add a few final ideas and risks within the paintings to add to their theoretical content. I have chosen to blur the boarders that keep each form separate from each other by using pigment heavily thinned with linseed oil medium, in order to allow hints of a figure ground relationship between layers. Aesthetically, this will help the audience to view the paintings as unified compositions, with less of a disconnect between the two individual ideas each painting is depicting. It will also reset each viewer’s point of focus (background in focus, foreground is blurred), which will force them to view each composition in a different way. Theoretically, it hints at a few different subliminal meanings to the more literal ideas this work is displaying. The breaking of boundaries between layers implies an intermingling between the symbolism and objectivism I am investigating, while the variation of focus between objects implies its relevance to the topic at this current moment in cultural and artistic history. Physically, this alteration may not fully achieve the goals I hope for with such little time to complete, but I feel that the knowledge I have learned from my past choices and mistakes is being applied within it.

Overall, this class has been a journey of uncertainty and feeling lost in the process, but has given me a sense of clarity of different ways of thinking for the future. I’m excited for the show and to celebrate all the work and growth that my colleagues and I have endured over the last ten weeks within our own experiences as artists. The reason an artist creates and the choices (good or bad) that they make during their process are just as important as the end product that they produce.

This project is an investigation of animal content in contemporary painting through the lens of symbolism and objectification. My goals for this project is to question why animal portraiture is becoming less and less prominent in post-modern painting, and why the use of animals can dangerously boarder on kitsch in modern times.

I will be working on a total of four paintings, two on homemade stretched canvas with dimensions of about 18’x24′, and two on primed canvas board with dimensions of 7’x9′. All of them will depict a separate animal in two ways layered on top of each other. The first layer will show the animal in their “cartoon” form, or in another pop culture reference to represent the anthropomorphistic symbolism that humankind applies to the animal. The second layer with depict the respected animal’s skull as a representation of objectification. Once cropped and combined together, these two layers will act as a landscape instead of figurative portraiture. This action will create an improvised post-modern “environment” for the general subject matter to exist in. On top of this landscape, small generalized silhouettes of the animal will be placed along the abstracted forms in the background to further imply landscape instead of figure work. These paintings will be in oil paint, with glazing and indirect painting elements applied.

Until the end of the quarter, I hope to improve my work by adding extra references and expanded “practice” work/thumbnails to help structure the project and work through problem solving.

Supports: Two handmade stretched canvas, with wooden stretchers and gessoed canvas. Each canvas is primed with a thick and textured gesso, with different colored acrylic underpainting on top. Dimensions: 18’x24′ Canvas board primed with thin, non-textured white gesso. No acrylic underpainting applied. Dimensions: 7’x9′.

Technique: Use of glazing with linseed oil and gamsol, indirect painting and prolonged process. Detail-oriented work will be a focus, and layering of content is essential to the project.

Subject: Use of animals in contemporary painting to convey multiple meanings and ideas

Content/Imagery: Animal portraiture and figurative work. Use of animals in different contexts: as cartoons, as still-life of skulls, and as abstracted and generalized silhouetted forms. Four different animals, one for each painting: Coyote, Deer, Beaver, and Grizzly Bear.

Style/form/scale:  Two larger paintings on stretched canvas, two smaller paintings on canvas board. All “cartoon” layers are expanded to the point of cropping as a form of abstraction, “skull” layers cropped, but not as much as the cartoon layer, this magnification helps transform the forms into landscapes instead of figures. Silhouette forms are small, with multiples for each painting in order to fit into landscape.

Productivity: I hope to complete all cartoon layers by Monday, November 26th. All skull studies will be completed by Friday, November 31st. Detail work, silhouettes and finishing touches will be made over the weekend.

Genre: Still-life, landscape, and portraiture. Abstraction through the use of cropping, distorted color schemes, and brushwork throughout the pieces. Pop-art, impressionism, and stylized realism all have elements throughout composition. The most relevant genres are landscape and stylized realism.

Constraints: Limited color schemes for each painting. Varying size, two panels smaller than the larger, more detailed paintings, with less priming and preparation involved. The two smaller ones are on canvas board to reduce time-consuming prep work before starting the actual painting process.

2 Artist Mentors: Georgia O’Keefe (Practice:Imagery, style, color use and form abstraction) Andy Warhol (Theory: Pop-art, use of kitsch and superficiality within work, commentary about modern times, and human consumerism)

My long range goals are to develop a style and a background in the use of animals in contemporary art. I want to develop a knowledge base of how humans use animals as tools to convey meaning in art, and how they view them within their own own anthropocentric perspective of the world. This will help me develop my own perspective of animals in art, and how to depict this content in a more-informed way through my art in the future.

Current Discussion Question: How does the contemporary Western world depict and use specific animals of North America in post-modern painting?

Week 8 has been a week of revision, theoretical process and narrowing of ideas for me. I have not done any physical progress on my painting this week after comments and feedback were given to me by the professor and my peers. I hope to work on thumbnails and more studio development throughout my project in the week to come to supplement all of the theoretical revision I’ve been given.

This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about genre in my own work, and how that fits into the post-modern times we live in. During critique, peers described my in-progress paintings as pop art and landscape, partially due to the fact that the figures I’ve depicted act as the background, instead of having their own relationship with space. I think I can categorize my plans for finalized work as mostly conceptual with hints of ambiguous abstraction, landscape, and still life, but I’m still uncertain.

The idea of following a question instead of a statement within the process has also been a relevant topic of the week. After receiving feedback and revision of my creative essay, I’ve realized that the ideas I have put in place are no longer following a line of inquisition, but instead acting as a statement to support the art I do. This isn’t because they can’t be taken further, but rather because I have subconsciously chosen to end them through my explanation and interpretation of ideas. What I mean by this? Well, instead of leaving my essay open ended, I end it with “there is an infinite amount of ways to interact with animals, and we can’t investigate them all. Here are three concrete ways of doing it.” After reflecting on this, I’ve come to the conclusion that as an artist, I subconsciously feel uneasy when a project or topic doesn’t have an end point or definitive answer. This is a hard realization to come to, but I hope to be more aware of these tendencies, and  be more open to new pathways of thought in the future.

Speaking of new pathways of thought, I’ve also been reading articles given to me by Shaw on the anthropocene, sustainability, and how human-animal interaction relates to it. It’s been hard for me to let go of my already established ideas and bring this into the mix, but I feel that the information I’m being given is too beneficial to my expansion of thought to leave out. I’ve also decided to cut my structured ideas of anthropomorphism as it’s own separate theme out, because I feel that it is not part of my own context and I don’t know enough about it to represent it accurately and in a non-kitschy way. I feel much more connected to the ideas of sustainability, urbanization, domestication through my own experience than that of anthropomorphism. That isn’t to say I will cut it out completely, but rather reference it in terms of symbolism that try to talk about it as its own entity without much cultural or personal background.

Some of the resources that have influenced this shift are: What’s Behind Art’s Current Obsession with Animals? (Article found of ArtNet), The Presence of Animals in Contemporary Art as a Sign of Cultural Change (PDF given to me by Shaw), Late Harvest (Book at the Evergreen Library that documents an Art Exhibition in Nevada), and Making Nature, an exhibition referenced in a few separate articles.

Another question that I hope to examine in my work came from a few of the exhibitions of contemporary animal art I’ve looked at. There seems to be a big boom in Animal depictions of art in the contemporary art work, but most of the critically examined pieces were sculptural or photographic. Why is there not the same abundance in contemporary painting?

To be honest, I feel a little hesitant about my plans for painting in this project. I’ve been struggling to translate the massive body of information that I believe is relevant from writing and words into painting without being too obvious, muddy, or kitschy. I believe that my plan of layering could work, but may not be able to get across everything I need to say. I might need to plan on a third painting, and definitely need to develop thumbnails and sketches before working on finalized work this week. I’m in the process of untangling my newly revised ideas as we speak.

All of the feedback I’ve been given on my paper and concepts has been tremendously helpful. The conversation I had with others about anthropomorphism and how to condense information will help me stay on track without expanding too much, and the editing and annotated side notes I was given by Cambria and Gerri will be extremely beneficial when polishing the final draft of my essay. I was given feedback from a few peers on my paintings, including areas of form that needed to be worked on, expanded and polished.

The feedback on my overall plan of development and composition of my paintings was a bit contradicting. I feel that the professor’s criticism was cautionary about moving forward, but many of my peers were supportive in the advancement of my plans. The only person who can decide the right path to take as I move forward is me though, and a decision needs to be made soon. I do know I want to paint over the Bambi and Coyote regardless, because of viewer’s interpretations of my connections with Disney and Warner Bros, which were not correct. I’m just not sure of what to paint and how many layers are necessary or too much, which hopefully will get worked out through sketches and thumbnails I plan to do over the weekend.

This week, I was proud of myself for accepting the fact that I don’t like not knowing. This was a big accomplishment because of the fact that I seem to trick myself into thinking that I’m out of control and taking risks, when really, I’m still staying in the confines of my own comfortability. I’m not really sure how to proceed into a place of unknowing without simply not knowing, but I’m hoping that the more open, uncomfortable, and risky I feel, the more I will let go of the mental control I try to maintain at all times. By breaking down the three solid categories of depiction I’ve developed, by letting go of my already established plans for a final idea, I’m attempting to take that step, without an obsessive want to know exactly where I’m going with this.

Is this what it feels like to be a genuine artist? I don’t even know anymore.

This week, we as a class have been working through our final project ideas, paintings, and essays as the end of the quarter looms in the distance. I have been toying with a variety of ideas this week, but wanted to focus my time on layering. This is in the physical sense of layering paint on canvas, but also with the layering of perception that come along with the idea of portraiture. The ways in which people interpret and interact with their environments of nature are infinite, and too large for me to investigate all at once. Therefore, my final project question has been morphing throughout the week, and currently it is:

How does the contemporary western world depict and interact with specific animals in North America?

This has changed a bit from my previous idea, but still has the same ties in symbolism, human projection, and animal/portraiture content. I’ve whittled down what I’m really looking for in this project, and although it is a still a very big range of questioning, I feel more comfortable with the constraints I’ve allowed myself in terms of theory. My research has taken me on many different paths through multiple genres of study. Even in this specific field of questioning, the perspectives that I could depict in my paintings are far too many. I’ve created three general categories of interaction/perspective that condense much of the information I have already gathered. These categories are Animism, Symbolism, and Objectivism. Each of these categories will be represented by a different style and form of how we view deer and coyotes.

There has been a lot of valuable material from my pool of research this past week, but some of the most influential books and vessels of information have been Sigmund Freud’s The Totem and Taboo, books on Warner Bros, and Disney Animation, the movie Bambi, and Animals with Faces, a exhibition dedicated to artists who use animals as literal and satirical content in their work. These resources helped me develop my categories and think on broader terms as to how animals are used by humans as content and objects.

On Monday, after presenting our question and studio plan in class, I felt stuck. I had spent so much time in theoretical research, that when asked about how I was going to paint this question, I have nothing more to say than “stylized realism” on stretched canvas. Shaw helped me change direction by questioning how these paintings were going to be different than any other kitschy animal study devoid of deeper meaning, and got my thinking about depth, layering, and transparency. During our “sketch in writing” critiques, my colleagues gave me good feedback as to how I could narrow my research question into focusing on the actual act of perceiving these animals, which relates to the concepts I have for my painting more than my previous question did.

I’m letting go of my sense of control this week by choosing to layer different representations of these animals on top of one another, to allow a more abstract yet well-rounded final profile of each animal. This will be done in stages, with the first representation being laid down in transparent, medium heavy oils. Come Monday, I will scrub most of the center of each painting away, and add my next layer of portraiture on top of the first. This week, I finished the first stage, which is representing the symbolic/iconographic view. Overall, I’m satisfied with how the first layer turned out on both of my pieces, yet didn’t expect to feel as apprehensive about painting over each one next week. This is all part of the experimentation process though, and I’m devoted to taking the risks that will come with next week.

For me, the most significant accomplishment of this week was the act of thinking outside of my comfort zone with how I am going to conduct this project, and letting go of the perfection that usually surrounds my work. I don’t really have a final vision of how these pieces are going to look at the end of the quarter, but the act of not knowing is enjoyable and new in itself. I hope to continue this pleasure even into next week, when I really have to allow myself the freedom to mess up or fail, but I’m proud of taking that first step towards that act.

Next week, I plan on adding my second/middle layer and category of thought, which is Animism. I hope to depict these in a general way, with naturalistic renditions of both animals with humanlike features incorporated into the portraits. Part of me worries that these might become overwhelming and confusing with the many layers of different content I’m choosing to add, but the other part of me thinks that helps add to what I am trying to get across to my audience-Human relationships with animals are complex, confusing and very messy. Only next week will be able to real veal how it will turn out. The week after that I plan to add the top layer, which is representing the category of Objectivism. This layer will be detailed studies of each animal’s skull, cropped on top. Plans will change as obstacles arise. To learn more about what I am putting into action next week, refer to my studio pan for week 8 in the Final Project Category of the website.