Painting and Mixed Media Final Reflection

The ideas within my collages became more developed through the transformation inherent to translation when I made painted versions of them. I would not, however, ultimately call these new takes on the original material successful.

My last collage, the red one, seemed a good place from which to start, as it had the most painted elements. Still, the composition never quite came together from its original half-baked conception. I still didn’t know what it wanted to be.

My floating man painting looks like the preliminary idea for the floating man collage, not the other way around! What made the initial piece work was the integration of real texture and dimension in contrast to the surrounding sense of immateriality. I tried to keep the painting simple and it became less interesting.

My last piece, the Valentine-bomb, is the one that came closest to cohesion. I did my version of a paint-only collage by juxtaposing thick, blended swathes of oil with the obvious brushstrokes terpenoid-thinned areas and sections of exposed underpainting. These sections of nakedness add to the violence of the piece. Yet something feels like it’s missing.

My paintings are more aware compositionally than my collages as I had a picture of the whole to work off. They were in no danger of sprawling off on their own--and this is part of my problem with them. My painted versions all still wanted to be collages. I tried to allow the paintings to build off of their references, to have them say more. I did not deviate enough from the original images for this to occur, and, ultimately, their “more-ness” appears as redundancy. I used the collages as instructions when they could have serves as prompts. The effect is a strange one; the paintings appear as coat hangers upon which other coat hangers are hung when it is clear hats and furs should be hanging there instead.

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Part 1

Painting and Mixed Media

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