I have so far completed about three paintings in the month of February 2021. The portrait’s medium’s are pastel with collaged media such as household items, makeup and glitter. These paintings are drawings from my mother’s 70’s Ebony magazines. I wanted to recreate these magazine pages because I am starting to become more interested in the 70’s glamour and style. I am actually going to overlap my advanced painting project with my photo 1 class, and even photograph my friend’s as high fashion 70’s portraits.
The challenges I have experienced while creating these paintings is the collage aspect. Using hot glue as an adhesive for my collage materials has had its faults. Hot glue does not stick well to pastel which has been a learning experience for me. I think I am going to try other kinds of adhesive for my paintings and see how well they compare to hot glue. The most successful part of my paintings is the fact that I am very passionate about creating them. I have a certain joy while making my portraits because it gives me outlet from the restrictions of Covid-19. Covid-19 has made it difficult for people to go out to restaurants and bars to experience nightlife in Columbus. I felt this restriction in my own experience because I was used to going out most weekends with friends trying to relieve stress from the struggles of being a college student. When bars and restaurants closed down due to Covid-19 however, I managed to create that same experience of “going out” with my portraits.
My paintings “glamour” features stem from the idea of myself getting dressed to go out with friends. The act of putting on makeup, doing my hair and even looking in the mirror gave me a certain confidence and satisfaction that was missed while I was under lockdown due to the pandemic.
Advanced Painting series: Final of series
I have finally finished my series for this semester. Originally, I wanted to create at least nine, but with the various other studio classes I was taking there was just not enough time. However, I am pleased with what I was able to create over the past three months. The first two portraits below are in pastel with mixed media and the last one is in pastel. These three are similar to the series I had in the TBD exhibition earlier in the semester. The similarities lie within the elements of decoration and media. I chose to focus on the 70s Ebony magazine aspect once again, because I was still in love with the idea of “glamour.” These portraits are somewhat different from the TBD exhibition series because I chose to use charcoal instead of pastel in one of my portraits as the main source of medium.
My subject for this last series was Ebony magazine portraits. My studio research question was “how can I create Glamour within a painting”? This semester I have made an effort to look into the history of Ebony magazines specifically, the era of the 1970s. I have chosen this era because my mother has archived the magazines from her childhood and I think that the history was important to document creatively. My research also included looking into the photography of the magazines. I wrote about the photographer, Moneta Sleet, who was a famous photographer of the 70s. His job included documenting acts of Black history and photographing for Ebony magazine. I decided to write about Sleet for my photography class this semester because his work resonated with not only my photography work but my paintings too. There is a link to read about Sleet and his iconic work below:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1edD38QJirASzalq0gqmrFaqdDeZZ6hgUTjmU88xAbBo/edit?usp=sharing
