Hi Everyone!
Here are some of my throwback Thursday posts that I like to put on Facebook and Instagram. They are great opportunities to look and back on my old work and reflect on how far I have come in the last few years. I hope you enjoy!
In this throwback post I thought it would interesting to look at two different styles I implemented in with a single reference. Before creating the realistic version of this painting I decided to make an energetic and expressive study to get a rough impression of the subject and experiment with color. Once I got into it I really enjoyed jumping around the piece with spontaneous brushwork that seemed to add some nice movement to the figure and the light source. Now I don’t always create these impressionistic studies but in this instance it serves as an interesting comparison to the more realistic “final” painting. In the realistic version I worked in sections with a variety of brushes to both apply and blend the paint. I focused on blending and color accuracy to make the piece realistic and nuanced.
I feel like both of these painting styles have a place in my creative practice and in the artistic world as a whole. Being spontaneous and heavy handed can serve as an amazing break from my usual detail oriented process. And I greatly admire fellow artists who can blend both realistic and expressive techniques into a single dynamic painting. Overall I really love how there is so much to explore in the realm of painting and I feel like I have barely scratched the surface!
For this post I thought I would show a triple comparison showing my progression from High School to College and finally professional art! And I want to take this opportunity to talk about the most important thing that I learned in this 15 year process.
Throughout my education I was especially lucky to have much more exposure to art than most and it really worked well for me. But like most children who are artistically inclined I was only rewarded for my "inherent artistic talent." Me and other creative students were told over and over again that we were talented and this choice of words told us that our artistic ability was fixed and couldn't be changed. Now I don't blame anyone for this because as a culture this is how we see artists because we don't understand them. So my time creating art in high school was great overall but I still was not able to shed this preconception that I was "talented" and therefor not able to improve.
My art experience in college was a transition time, I started to make a connection between practice and improvement in my art. My professors were the first people to tell me that art is a skill that can be developed over time. All of the sudden art felt less mysterious to me, I always knew that I was a hard worker and now I was starting to find a place to dedicate my effort.
It's safe to say that my professional career as a painter would not have happened if I wasn't shown that art is a skill not an innate talent. So much of how I work now is based on practice and slow improvement, trying to make every painting better than the last using my own personal growth to measure success. And I look forward to learning and improving as much as I can for the rest of my life 🤗
Thanks for listening