"Things that Feel Like Home" Painting Series
My first University Honors Program was a self-design experience. The "Things that Feel Like Home" Series was created to help me reconnect with my love for painting while also helping me get out into the local artistic community in Cincinnati.
"Lavender Fields" is one of my later paintings from the series. I created it because lavender is one of my favorite flowers. I used a large amount of paint to create a thick smeared texture on the flowers and the background sunset. I named it to mimic "Strawberry Fields Forever" by the Beatles. I learned how to create texture within a painting to give it a more 3D look, which was one of my outlined goals for the project. Overall, this painting made me confident in my artistic abilities and helped me reconnect with my love for flowers and gardening.
"Fort Meyers" is the main example of texture within the series. It has sugar mixed in with the sand-colored paint to create a realistic feeling of sand on the canvas. This is a rendering of a picture I took on my vacation last year. I learned how to create a rough texture within paint by adding different materials to it. This painting encouraged me to be nostalgic about the past but also look at where I stand now and see how much progress I have made since then.
"Vienna" is the oil-painted portrait piece of my series. It is a portrait of Billy Joel with one of his most famous songs "Vienna" titled below him. The reference picture I chose was painted in all grey/black/white tones. I challenged myself to recreate the portrait without having very many colors to use. I learned how to manipulate light and shadows when painting his face specifically. I was not expecting this painting to turn out nearly as good as it did. This helped me realize that I should try different things more often, I might actually be good at them.
"Luck of the Draw" is my favorite painting I made. It is a still life incorporating a bunch of little meaningful objects onto a green gambling baize board. Glass is notoriously hard to paint, thus I am proud of my mini martini in the middle of the canvas. This is another painting where I exercised how to manipulate light. Specifically in the martini glass and the shadows that appear on the cards in the bottom left corner. When was trying to figure out what I should include in the painting, it brought back a lot of memories from when I was younger. It made me think about how much I have changed and what has stayed the same over the years.
"Postcards from Nowhere" is my least favorite painting I made. This was the first painting I finished when I got back into the groove of art, and it shows. I like the sunglasses with their manipulation of shadows and light, I think the postcards look immature and not very well done. The shadows and light in the sunglasses and perfume bottle were a huge learning curve since I hadn't painted in a long time. This painting affected me by helping me restart my "creative engine" if you will. I had to come up with a completely new concept and I think I did well in that regard.
