Foundation Drawing: Final Weeks

In the last few weeks we mostly worked on our final painting or paintings for the class. A little before that, our only two assignments were to paint something that included figures seen below us from a great height, and then to paint near the Arboretum building on Swarthmore’s campus.

This is a photograph of what I painted for the first assignment. It is the interior of the Museum of Modern art, and that big yellow square is all bee pollen. It’s an art piece made by Wolfgang Laib that was on view from January to March of this year. Here is my painting of it:

For the final painting, we could do whatever we wanted. Most people in my class chose to do a series of small paintings. I found over the semester that I really enjoy painting in large scales, so I decided that I wanted to do a monumentally large canvas painting. I was inspired by a phrase that a friend of mine mentioned in our Bible study group, where he said that when we are washed in Christ’s blood, we are purified. So I went with that metaphor and wanted to create a painting with an impure figure that, when touched by blood, turned white to symbolize her new purity.

I started off by mixing red and green paint in a plastic cup with a lot of water to make it pretty viscous, and then I poured it at the top of the canvas to let it drip down to the bottom of the canvas. That canvas is about 65 x 36 inches. I had to put it together and stretch it myself, although I got much-needed help from a classmate and my professor. I’m glad I learned how to stretch canvas, however, because that will be a useful skill for future art classes.

This is the canvas after I finished “painting” the blood. This was by far the most fun part of making this painting. The technique reminded me of the action painters, and I almost felt like one.

This is a close-up of the red. I purposely made it thick enough so that it would be tactile and somewhat three-dimensional.

This is the painting with the figure added in, before I add in the white. In order to emphasize the impurity of the figure, I painted its facial features in the wrong places, with the lips on the forehead and the eyes upside down and moved around. I definitely borrowed that idea from one of my all-time favorite paintings of Marc Chagall, “Oh God.” I realized afterwards I should have painted the figure before I poured on the red blood, because I had to go back and reapply red so it would fall over the figure, whose black covered up the red I had already painted/poured.

This is the final painting. At the end I decided to paint in with white a few parts in the upper portion of the canvas where the red had by chance made an outline that resembled a cross. I wanted to make sure that there was no ambiguity about whether this painting was Christian or not. My favorite part of the painting is the splashing of white that is seen on the shoulders of the figure. It really evokes the spray of water and is exactly what I wanted. If I could have done things differently, I would have made the body of my figure differently, perhaps more detailed and complex than it is now. But because I don’t have much skill in figure composition now, I wasn’t confident enough in my abilities to do that. But overall I am satisfied with how the painting turned out.