Blast from the Past

So I read through my blog. Not every sentence of course but skimmed it. I write a lot about wanting to paint. I've failed pretty miserably on actually doing any painting for the most part. I think that will change soon. I've been trying to come up with some good ideas all day. Like I said, when you don't have the constriction of school, art becomes a little more difficult.

I once had this assignment to appropriate another artist. We could straight copy a famous artist or we could find a painting we really loved and take the basic idea and meld it with our own. I had watched a ton of Art 21 pretty close to this assignment and so I decided to pick one of the artists from that. I had really loved Michael Ray Charles paintings.
Like this one
I found one similar to it and came up with this.
Single White Female

The scale of this was pretty large if you don't see the person on the couch behind it. It's 5.5 feet tall and 4.5 wide. Largest painting I have still done to date. It inspired a lot of conversation about using out life experiences as a scape goat. Taking advantage of ideas about blonds. However, since I have been blond and single the majority of my life I think I have every right to paint about it. I was also just a little bitter the summer that I painted it. I believe Michael Ray Charles has the right to paint about the image of African Americans. he has dealt with plenty of stereotyping and strife. For what? All artists can do is commentate and expand on our experiences. This doesn't mean our art has to be the sort of in your face kind that makes people squirm, but if you are a part of the stereotype you have the right to. That is my two cents anyway.

I want to share an artist I recently heard about who happened to go to my high school. His name is Michael Vasquez and he too paints about his experiences. Check out his work.... Shown here
as well as this site that talks about the work!
It was very interesting.

Still deciding what to paint about. Hopefully will have actual artwork soon.