Artist Statement
The piece is entitled “Questioning”. A digital collection of layers and Pngs meshed into a portrait. I started with finding a portrait I liked, searching Pinterest. I found a portrait of a woman up close and began mapping out a basic sketch. The sketch was the easiest part, taking about twenty minutes. I then spent around five hours beginning a digital oil paint base. First, I color picked and selected the closest to the portrait and began placing dots of color on the sketch before I began blending the colors into a base for the skin and the portrait. I then began adding the mouth, going for a horse’s mouth foaming at the bit, but without the foam. I added another layer and spent around an hour carving out the teeth and placing them in open lips. I started separate layers for each feature and began to paint eyes, starting with the base off-white color and repeatedly changing the feature until I decided the portrait was not what I initially intended.
I wanted to create a piece that asked a question of pain. After spending time in the hospital, I wanted to create a piece that represented feelings of paralysis and the inability to do what I love. I remembered paint on glass techniques as I started and decided to lean into the aesthetic. I decided to lose the focus on the original concept of oil painting and beauty to represent pain, and to lean into the obscurity of it all. Eyelashes that looked like spiders, and big nostrils to flatter the horses’ mouth. I wanted an exclamation point as the nose, to draw attention towards it, but blended away to flatten the nose and the appearance of the face. Each layer worked like another panel of glass. I wanted question marks as the eyebrows from the beginning, to hone in the point of “questioning”.
Paint on glass can be done with any type of paint, oil, acrylic, or even a POSCA pen. I decided to replicate each medium of the technique by adding blood to my already wet beautiful skin and rugged layered features. This was done by adding blood to represent the blood I had drawn over several days in the hospital. To finish the point of the piece, to make the audience think and the question.