Critique With Hung Liu

     The chance to critique with Hung Liu yielded what may have been the greatest critique I have had all quarter. Hung's work is actually very similar to my own... it was something that I had not realized during her lecture last night, but was actually brought up by her when we met. Our interests both lie in identity, but in slightly different contexts with Liu's work looking at human (specifically cultural) identity, while mine focuses on biology and species identification. In fact, the first thing she did when confronted with one of my drawings, was point to the tag associated with the bird.
     It was actually the drawing of the bird that I first did for a lithography print that Hung spent the most time on and used it to compare with some of my newer paintings. She said that the reason that this drawing was so successful was due to the lack of tooth in the paper. The negative space TRULY becomes ignored. It also helped that the paper color was not a pure white, but rather a cream color. Hung suggested that for my next painting, I should keep the straight-colored wash in the background, but instead of using a stark white, switch to a more neutral tone of beige... one which matches the paper that supported the original graphite drawing. Additionally, she pointed out something I hadn't seen before in my work. Though I had been sanding down the white surface to make it smooth, many brushstrokes still remained... when hit with the correct light, they appear as lines and take away from the actual image. She said that I could avoid this by sanding EACH layer rather than just the final one. Genius!

      For the past week, I have been experimenting with getting rid of the background all together... I decided to paint a hummingbird on the raw wood, exposing the grain. After Hung's critique today, we both agree that this is actually much more distracting than the white brushstrokes and have collectively decided that my future work needs to have a clean backdrop in order to compliment the realism in each subject. Tonight, I am beginning to prep an entirely new set of birch wood panels - ones which have already been prepped and sanded, and are completely smooth all around. No more grain for me.

I hope this blog post made sense... I'm sort of writing this absent-mindedly because I'm really psyched to see what these will look like once I put Hung's suggestions into action. Also, I took a selfie with her. Jealous?!