He'll Be Ok Right?

     

     Well not really... he's dead. But don't feel so bad - I actually found him that way! With the weather as nice as it was this morning, I decided to head out and go on a little excursion to collect anything that I could find that would be worth making art from! I happened to stumble upon this little fella who seemed like the perfect candidate for one of my next specimen paintings. This is one of the many steps I plan to take for the future of my work - collecting and photographing my OWN material. 

     Over the past few weeks, I have had several serious conversations with Deborah about my work and where to go from here as I diverge on a new, more biologically-driven road. The problem with my work isn't that it is not painted well, but rather in the way it was presented in terms of my own message, which has always been richly based in a science and the museum context. She told me to go back to the drawing board and start simpler - do away with the complex surrealist scenes for now, and instead focus on painting actual specimens as they appear in life. Deborah's suggestion was to look at the works of William Harnett, a painter who often painted objects to appear as if they existed in real space with the viewer. It is a style that makes sense with my need for achieving realism, as it would be an added illusionistic technique to my already life-like style. It was also in Deborah's suggestion to paint life size as these paintings would stand as literal recordings of a particular object.
     This week I completed a painting that followed some of these rules and was incredibly happy with the result. My stubbornness as an artist often means that I'm not one for change, but I decided to open up and follow suggestions with nothing but positive results. The plan for the new painting I just completed of a hummingbird specimen is for it to become a part of a quadric series of bird specimens (possibly all hummingbirds), so I will post pictures of the paintings once all four have been completed.