new kim painting
Thursday, May 22, 2008
I'm about ready to start my next painting. I'm bordering on having free time again, as the hunt for the next year's apartment winds down, and I picked up a big new canvas from Forstall Art Supply. I was looking for something in the 3x5' range. The closest they had was 4x5', which is close, but that extra foot makes a big difference. It's kinda like the difference between widescreen and standard tvs / monitors.
So this is a drawing of a picture I took of Kim during one of our last weekends in Milwaukee. We were kinda roaming around town, going to parks and coffee shops that we had frequented in our 12 years there. We stopped at Lake Park and sat in the field near Lake Dr. and Bellecastle. The first apartment we lived in was about 8 blocks away on the corner of Frederick and Bellecastle. We had played frisbee in that field with friends and walked on the short trails in the woods with the kids... We were wrapping up our time in Milwaukee and it was as fitting a place as any to sit and enjoy some sunshine.
Ironically, the background in the photograph is entirely boring so I've replaced it with another photo that I took soon after moving to Nola of Arrowhead Elephant Ears taken at her friend's wedding at Acadian Village in Lafayette, La. I took a bunch of pictures of plants on the grounds with the express purpose of painting them, so I guess now I'm finally getting around to it.
The thing that draws me to this composition in particular is that it reminds me of Botticelli's Birth of Venus (at left) and, to some extent more, Warhol's rendition -- but only in that Warhol cropped the original down, where this is only a detail of Botticelli's entire work. Of course at close inspection they're not much alike, but the curvature of the neck and face, the waves in the hair, and the somewhat distant look definitely has a certain similarity, albeit incidental.I'm also pretty happy with the color palette and I hope that I can be successful in recreating these colors in acrylic. I'll post a pic or two of the painting as I get going.
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