Sadly, this is the first year since I have been fifteen that I have not made a birthday drawing on time. And while I did not end up finishing my birthday piece even close to “on time” I’ll still talk about it and the meaning
Every year on my birthday, specifically for my birthday, I draw myself. (Spoiler alert: self-portrait artist draws HERSELF on her birthday.)
I really wanted to push myself this year, I feel like I have been getting too comfortable and not experimenting as much as I used to. My freshman year of college funnily enough, before I switched to an art major, I experimented the most. I would draw in a wide range of sizes, from post it notes to 11 x 14” paper (which was massive to me back then.) Now I pretty much exclusively draw on 22 x 30 or maybe 18 x 24” but I don’t vary the sizes like I used to. With the one exception of that 7 x 4’ piece I made back in September.
I used to draw/paint in any and every medium I could get my hands on, digital, watercolor, acrylic, pens, pencils, etc. I never used to use exclusively one medium like I do now. I think strictly using pencils and charcoal (and occasionally pen) has made me super bored.
I decided for my birthday art this year to go so far out of my comfort zone and straight into the sticky and messy world of Oil Painting. I even made the composition of the figures so I would have to paint 99% of the hair this time. If you know me in real life, you’ll know there two things in regards to art that I have always said with passion:
- I hate drawing hair
- I hate oil painting
Naturally my birthday slash to get out of my comfort zone piece of art would have to include those two things.
And let me tell you, it has been a struggle. Not only did I not really have time to start a massive oil painting, but I forgot how long they take to dry. I had a very short deadline for this piece, just a little under a week, and if this was a pencil drawing that would have been plenty of time. Unfortunately this is an oil painting and that was not plenty of time.
And as of writing this I am currently away and will not be able to work on this piece until the very end of August. I really, really hope that it’s dry when I get back to my studio but with the amount of layers I’ve already slathered on this thing I doubt it.
Backstory over, onto the meaning.
I have done a lot this year, and I really wanted to capture that in this piece. Originally I had a very detailed and maximalist painting in mind. I wanted to quite literally paint every single “thing” I have accomplished this year. But I really do not like drawing small details let alone painting them, and I wanted to play around with a more surrealist style. I typically tell people I have a surrealist style but I don’t think my work has reflected that recently.
Below is the current state of the painting; I tried to get all the details mapped out before I left so what you see now is pretty much just the unrefined final piece.
This whole concept started with those shoes. Originally the painting was supposed to have a car in it, but that obviously never happened. During the planning stages of this piece I had an idea to represent this year through a painting of my car with balloons coming out of the trunk. It was going to have a super dramatic angle and I promise the concept looks amazing in my head, just trust me you would have loved it.
The reason I had wanted my car was because my first car broke down right at the beginning of the spring semester. Literally the day I was moving back into Marywood, my car broke down the second I pulled into a parking spot. I thought that it was ridiculously good luck that it didn’t break down on the highway or a road, and super unlucky that it happened right at the start of a new semester. I liked that duality and thought it was a great representation of my twentieth year. I have had a lot of amazing career opportunities this year but also had to leave my position as Director of Pink Arrow Arts Gallery to pursue those other opportunities. A very bittersweet moment.
However, I needed a stronger concept than “car broke down at the most amazingly perfect time but also sad because my car broke down.”
So of course my brain went to all the cliche objects I could draw for turning twenty-one, and eventually I landed on these shoes. Kind of for similar reasons as I wanted to paint my car, but I think in a more subtle way. I got these shoes specifically for my job at the gallery, they are probably the nicest shoes I will ever wear. I’m normally a ten-dollar sneaker from Target kind of shoe-wearer.
I had the figures “one-foot-in, one-foot-out” out of shoes as an abstract representation of new beginnings. As well as it being unclear weather the shoes were being put on or taken off. Now that I am no longer at Pink Arrow, I don’t really have a need for these new shoes. I can’t see myself wearing them casually or to my new job, so they’re just kind of taking up space in my closet now.
And yes this was all one big excuse for me to paint the shoes, you caught me. If I’m rarely going to wear them I can at least paint them.
This is not obvious in the painting at all, which I like. I really do not like when my art is direct or to the point. I have said this plenty of times before and I’ll say it forever. I like it when people make their own assumptions or stories about my art. I do want there to be a sense of freedom when looking at this piece, or a sense of “openness.” Hence the blue sky/grass background. And I’m a sucker for triangle compositions so I had to fit that in there somehow. This is also still my birthday piece so I tried to fit as many of my current favorite things in as possible.
That also goes for the red, it’s my favorite color so it had to be in there somewhere and I wanted a little bit of heaviness in the piece. I originally was going for a monochrome palette and was just using Raw Umber. The first oil painting I ever made was made entirely of Raw Umber so I thought that would be a nice call-back. But that’s also “boring” and not really pushing me in any way so I expanded the palette. It has been a super long time since I have used this much color and it has been a challenge to remember color-theory and what colors look good together. That grass is not supposed to be puke green believe it or not. It’s not even really that bright, but because of the colors it’s near, it looks super strange on camera and in-person right now.
Overall, this is a piece of new-beginnings and this new pair of shoes I’m not too sure what to do with yet but I think that feeling will sum up my twenty-first year; I guess mission accomplished.
I do have another piece of art that I took with me to work on while I’m away for a while. I may or may not show that one in its entirety, it is a little graphic; I got back into my anatomy phase. It is the third and last piece (finally) in my triptych that I started back in January. If/when I talk about that piece I most likely will not show the entire thing and will not be showing progress photos of that one.
I will have a super exciting work update within the next two or three blog posts however! I may not have been working on my own personal art much this past year but I have been working on art. I am super excited to finally be able to talk about it and show it soon!
I hope everyone had a good summer and is ready for the fall semester to start back up again! Hopefully my car does not break down the second its front wheel touches the campus roads again.