The Trophy

oil on canvas

114"x78"

Hung Liu is a Chinese-American contemporary artist.  Much of her paintings deal with Chinese history and philosophy, as she was trained in the Chinese Socialist Realist style.  She combines realism with abstract, in a non surrealist fashion, which really highlights the emotion in her pieces.  Devoid of typical backgrounds and negative spaces associated with her subject's backgrounds, the subjects are set free within the pieces and shine as main actors, if not heroes.  I enjoy her style because it really blends two opposite techniques in a way that feels natural an unobtrusive.

collage

this is a project for surface research. the assignment was to take multiple pictures of a place or an object of our choice and collage them together.  after this step, we were told to paint the collage in acrylics.  the place i chose is under a bridge leaving richmond, which supports the foot bridge to belle isle.  i didn't want the composition to be a replication of the actual scene, but i wanted the viewer to be able to know that they were looking at the underside of a bridge.
this is my first time painting since high school, and the piece still needs a lot of work, i'm going to add more values and a little more detail.

final surface project

for our final surface project we were told we could do anything we wanted.  i was working with $0, but had a panel that my roommate found in the trash at the fine arts building and papier mache supplies left over from my space research project.  my initial plan was to build textures and different levels off of the panel with the mache and paint on top of the mache.  however, as i was testing this out, the paper folded over like fabric.  this gave me the idea to make the piece above.  i applied a layer of mache, and then added the folding fabric-esque paper on top of it.  i charcoaled the edges and inside the folds to accentuate them.

surface research/book/untitled

we were given an assignment to make a book documenting a week in our lives.  we could make the book as realistic or abstract as we wanted, as long as it captured seven days of time.
i took a picture each day (sometimes multiple) and the pictures on transparencies.  i then matted each one and bound them together into an accordion style book.  the images don't have backs on them so you can see through them. you can close two together at once to combine them.  the book has no front or back cover, so when it is closed, all of the pictures combine to create a dreamy mixture of colors and pictures.

Julie Mehretu

Stadia III (2004)

Julia Mehretu

ink and acrylic on canvas

This piece is meant to depict how the news and media made the Iraq war feel more like a video game than a real current event.  Subtle explosions, building diagrams, and geometric shapes are subtly drawn in ink in the background, while bright, geometric acrylic shapes are painted in the foreground.  The sporadic nature of the shapes offset the action in the background, and leave the viewer slightly confused without a focal point.  Here is a closer view of the ink in the background:

Charles Sheeler

Steel-Croton (1953)

Charles Sheeler

oil on canvas

Charles Sheeler is among a group of artists known as precisionists, who depict machine-age monuments of America in their art.  The piece is a layered, dizzied depiction of a steel-span bridge, with a composition based on French cubism.  This layering, almost like a multiple exposure, creates a feeling of fluidity, which was largely influenced by the mindset of the time it was created - as the country's industrial growth was exponential.

artist John Sloan

Stein at Window, Sixth Avenue (1918)

John Sloan

oil on canvas

Our Surface Research class went to the Virginia Museum of Fine Art (VMFA) to gain inspiration for our final projects, which are free of constraints or assigned concepts - we can do anything we want to.  In this piece, artist John Sloan painted the traditional, familiar model in the studio.  What is different, however, is that she isn't the typical object of beauty you find in classical paintings.  She's his sitter, Efzenka Stein, an immigrant from Bohemia.  She gazes out the window at the newly industrialized city, dressed in her working clothes.  This portrayal of simplicity, realism, and truth is beauty within itself.