journals for 2005

Example #1

Example #2

Example #3

..maybe coming soon

Journals - Painting
For: Professor Bruce Allen

Comfortable Piece and Medium

Here is (what I think is) the assignment: here I am to talk about the piece and the medium I am most comfortable with and how that medium works (for me), and the piece that I am the least comfortable with, again talking about the medium and how it works and so on.

So first thing is first, the piece I was most comfortable working on and its medium. To start off, I would like to say that the medium I found to be by far the most comfortable with me would have to be acrylic. So picking one piece here is kind of cheating, but I will do it anyway. As far as the best example goes, on which one I felt worked the way I wanted it to, I would have to say the Battle Royale piece.

This is, like I said, one of my acrylic pieces, and just the way it works was what made me so comfortable with it. I like the piece because I like the subject. Like in any class, something I am more interested in, I am bound to do better in it because of that. The painting is based off of the Japanese Thriller/Horror/Awesome film Battle Royale, which is more or less about a Japanese schoolclass that is taken from Japan to a small island where they have to fight to kill each other or they will be killed. Apparently the kids in Japan are really, freaking bad, because this is how they are taught their lesson. Either way, my painting is of Girl #11, Mitsuko Soma, played by Kou Shibasaki, or better known more affectionately as "Sickle Bitch." I really love the movie and I really loved this character, she was quite vicious. So I decided it would be in my best interest to portray her in a painting, since it would do this not super-well known film a little bit more justice. In fact two of my paintings for this semesters were based on film (the other being Amelie, Audrey Tautou, done in oil).

This piece was done during my glass experimental phase, but it really turned out well for a glass piece. As far as the glass goes and what effect it had on the painting and my painting on it, I had to paint it backwards, I had to paint dark colors first, and I had to be really careful.

So like I said, I did this piece using acrylic (on glass). I really like using acrylic because it is the perfect mixture of drying and correctablity (especially with glass). The acrylic medium dries at an incredible rate, no longer than 10 or so minutes usually. This comes in great handy if you like to work fast like I do. I don't like having to sit around and wait for the paint to dry, pardon the cliche, so it is nice to be able to work at my own rate. And with acrylic, it is not always bad to make mistakes because it can dry so fast. You can always just paint over it, as many times as you would like to if you do not like what you had previously done. Not only that, but when working with glass, a wet rag basically takes the paint right off, even when it has been dry for a while. And on such a smooth and solid surface, should I want to, the acrylic painting can be peeled right off and possibly even painted onto another painting. And this is many of the reasons that I like acrylic so much; there is just so much that you can do with it at any point during the process of the painting. And really it worked out for this piece quite well.

The way I did it is almost impressionistic at points. I used a very tiny brush and went in and did multiple colors for each of the different parts, especially on the jacket that the girl is wearing. I think it would have been interesting to see what some of the Impressionist painters would have done if they could have worked with acrylic more than oil or anything else. It certainly would have produced some fun paintings.

Least Comfortable Piece and Medium

Earlier I mentioned that I liked to work fast, and that is true, I do like to go fast but I like to work at my own rate. That is why I like and liked acrylic so much; it worked with me. Now there is a medium that you have to be even faster with and that is encaustic. If you are using the method where you have it melted on the heating box, then you have to know that it is going to dry by the second as soon as you take it off of there. Sounds interesting and sounds fun, but this was just not my medium for certain reasons.

When I do a painting, I like to have some time, every once in a while, to just step back and think about it mid-painting. This does not seem to be the case, for me at least, with encaustic. You need to be able to think quick, because although the process of completing an encaustic piece can take a while, while you are working on it you have to be thinking fast. I cannot always do this and this is why I feel that my encaustic piece, while they are not bad, are my least successful.

I guess the one I would choose in particular is the one that I did using the heat box. It is the one that is more or less a pseudo-landscape painting of some trees, some water, and the ground. Again I do not think that it is a bad piece, but I do feel that there really is not that much great stuff going on with it. The colors are nice and somewhat vibrant, but other than that I would not say there is much to look at.

The way I painted it was that I had the artboard/gesso board sitting in the middle of the heatbox so that it would supposedly keep the board somewhat warm (which I do not think it ever really did), and that was surrounded by a number of melted encaustic sticks, so that I could move directly from the wax right to the board. Even with this minimal space between the board and the colors, the encaustic would still dry on its way over to the board (which could not have been any longer than a second or so). Again the way the medium works in this method is that you take sticks or blocks of encaustic wax medium and you press them against the hot box until they melt into a puddle of the color you put on it. So like I was saying, I had blue, green, white, brown, and some black melted onto the box, and I was just trying to paint a coherent picture.

I guess the main reason that this was my least comfortable piece is again because of the speed at which you have to move. Also there is a color issue I have with encaustic. Although some of the colors are pretty bright (using this method), a lot of times they end up looking a bit chalky to me. There is of course the method where you mix the clear encaustic wax medium with oil paints and then melt it with a blowtorch, which is fun for a while and does not look that bad, but it is really hard to make anything precise using that method and it makes me just want to use oil paints instead.

So I do not think that there is really anything wrong with encaustic, if it is the medium of your choice, I just do not think I am quick enough in the head and/or talented enough to utilize the medium to its full potential. I am sure there are more amazing encaustic artists out there, that are not me. But oh well, I will try again oneday perhaps.