Art I
"I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream." -Vincent Van Gogh
5/4/2017 0 Comments Art Final ProjectLydia Gunn
Mrs. Whitney Art 1 (Yearlong) Final Art Project Based on Kehinde Wiley Passion, color, history, and beauty are intricately woven into each of Kehinde Wiley’s life-sized paintings. His art inspires and intrigues, depicting the beauty of African- American culture. Born in South Central Los Angeles in 1977, Kehinde first attended art school at age 11. In LA, he was involved in the environment that was driven by hip-hop culture: violence, anger, and antisocial behavior. His mother worked hard to get him and his siblings out of the hood. He would attend art school on the weekends, and there he most enjoyed trying to make one piece of art look like something completely different. This made him feel important and allowed him to think outside the box. Sometimes he would start with drawings of shadowed fruit, and then he would turn it into a human head and add the body. As an undergrad at the San Francisco Art Institute, he really focused on learning how to become a masterful painter, grasping all the aspects of the skill. And then at Yale University, he became much more focused on bringing out social issues like identity, sexuality and gender, politics, and other topics in his paintings, which is why his work is so important to art history. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and focuses on painting everyday African-American men and women, celebrating their culture through them. He once said, "I think there's something important in going against the grain, and perhaps finding value in things that necessarily institutionally recognized." He has many different collections of paintings from different places and of different people. Categories of these collections include the World Stage, in which Kehinde explores the socio-economic status of a nation through the everyday lives of people he meets on the street, and Selected Works, in which he chooses a specific topic or a group of people to focus his paintings on. "He has made an enormous name for himself in a very short period of time and established a very significant reputation," says Sean Kelly, owner of the Sean Kelly Gallery. Kehinde paints from pictures of real people. To find his models, he simply goes out into the streets wherever he may be, whether that's New York, or Brazil, China, India, Israel, or Tunisia, and talks to people who he thinks are interesting. Those people become his models, and Kehinde organizes photo shoots with them. After the photoshoot, he will have hundreds and hundreds of pictures that he narrows down to a about 15. Then he comes up with backgrounds, like wallpapers or textiles from historical periods, for those pictures. Those pictures and backgrounds then become life-size paintings full of beauty and passion. He uses oil paints to create these large paintings, but he has also explored the use of stained glass and sculpture. His paintings are typically colorful and heroic, inspired by old paintings from the High Renaissance, the late French Rococo, or the 19th century. He's also spent a lot of time looking at paintings in museums and replicating old paintings and incorporating African-American culture. I really enjoyed researching Kehinde and his work during the year and I love his ideas and the meanings behind his pieces. His empowerment of the African American race and the promotion of their culture and equality is very inspiring to me. He depicts the subjects of his paintings with such such perfect detail, an artstyle that is very attractive to me. I want to attempt to capture this same kind of beauty in my final project. My plan is to paint my friend Hannah in the stance of empowerment that is common in all of Kehinde’s pieces. My friend’s race is mixed with African American and Caucasian, and I chose her as the subject because I want my piece to be a representation of equality and empowerment for both races. I want to use Acrylic paint for this project. Kehinde usually uses oil paints for his projects, but that medium would be unsafe to use in a classroom setting. The toxins from the oil paint require more ventilation than the school art studio can provide, so I will settle for Acrylic paint. I plan to sketch the piece out with pencil on canvas before beginning, and then going back in with the acrylic to add details. I will need to utilize small brushes in order to achieve Kehinde’s level of detail I am hoping to imitate. I want to do this piece on a canvas the size of either 24x30, 20x24, or 18x24. Kehinde usually does his projects of large dimensions. His paintings are essentially lifesized, the huge canvas covered with color and details. These massive painting are modeled after the early European portraits, which are also very large in dimension. I am not planning on doing my piece quite as large, but I want it to be big enough to accentuate the details of the piece.
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Lydia GunnGo to the "Side Projects" page to see the artwork I've done outside of school. Archives
May 2017
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