Still Life

All those who know me, would describe me as an abstract artist, and even I consider myself as such. Yet there is some magic and satisfaction in knowing you have the technical skills to achieve photo-realistic painting.

To improve my skills in what I'm passionate about, I often do things that are outside my comfort zone, to conquer them and pull something unique out of them and apply it to my art practice.

As part of a class assignment, I had to paint a still life with three objects in them, one in normal colors, the other in analogues color scheme.

The part that I enjoyed the most, was staging the scene. I enjoyed it so much that I created another account on DeviantArt dedicated to stock images, mostly still lifes that I'll create.

~SanStock - my stock images.

They are free to use, the only thing I ask in return is to contact me in anyway you choose and link me the piece that you created, so I can feature them.. if you want to!

Enjoy ^^

Write visual compositions

One of the assignments in the “Concepts in contemporary art”, taught by Elizabeth Barnes, was to write something on a piece of paper and then cover some of the letters up. The end result was a very loose composition. 

Being a graphic designer, I see text as font and font as shapes. Often I make images completely out of text. This is a reverse process, you write and look for shapes that you want to keep working with and cover or distort the rest.

As I kept thinking of the assignment ahead, it was important for me to choose the right words. Where an image can be abstract and hard to understand, words are quite obvious. I created a weird sentence from words that were brought up in class and came up with “Vocal language of an absurd art point”. Since the words did not have any personal meaning, I had no problem covering anything up and stripping away all meaning. That is something people in my class struggled with, and it's important to keep that in mind and be able to distance yourself from the words.

I think the point of writing something and then hiding it under other layers can be useful in many ways. It is possible to let out emotions or thoughts that are bottled up inside, that normally would be hard to share, they will still be hidden but also out there for everyone to see, sort of a release. There could also be a personal message hidden in the layers of paint as expression of the creator to the receiver.

This exercise was highly useful. It created a very interesting and not forced composition, it is great for practice when you lack ideas or just want to be pushed out of the comfort zone to try something new. It is a lovely way to work with text and has the option to be as literal or abstract as you want it to be.