37) Bar

Bar. Summer 2009.

Mixed media on wood.

While i was still taking classes in IDEAS, i was working on my own project called "Bar".

A friend of my mom's had seen my work and she told me to make a big painting for the Bar/dining room.

It was the first time i had a real client and the first time i was really gonna get paid for my work.

I had no more information other than she wanted it for the Bar and she wanted it to be pretty modern, so this is what i came up with.

I chose to create the painting in different pieces of wood (Just like my "commodity of art" piece, only that i was using wood instead of canvas, because that was what i was learning at the moment and i wanted to get better at it).

I was going to make a big piece with lots of texture and 3d objects, so the first thing i had to work on was my textures and my reliefs before adding any color to the piece.

I love working with 3D objects because it is out of the ordinary and because it makes the piece interact more with the viewer. Since the piece was meant for a bar/dining room, i decided to use objects that would represent these places such as a bottle, corks, glasses and images of fruits. The bottle was the most challenging thing i had to do in this piece because it was the first time i was trying something so different and complicated. I cut the bottle in a way that i could place it on the surface facing upwards and so that it would be very noticeable but still not too heavy that it would make it harder to stay.

I tried to incorporate as many of the textures that i was learning as possible, and while doing do, i also ended up creating some of my one like my representation of wine. I wanted to make the liquid falling and flowing as exaggerated as possible so that it would create an impact in the entire piece. I pasted lots of crumpled paper towel on the wood (using a lot of glue so that it wouldn't come out), and that gave the surface a lot of relief, but in order to make it even more noticeable, i added molding paste on top, creating the wavy shapes with my pallet knife. Once the textures was finished i painted it all with a champagne acrylic color, followed by darker oil colors to create the shadows.

Here are a couple of close ups:

11) Tricia Courtney's monochromatic

Fall. 2007
Acrylic on board. Palette knives.

I was inspired by Tricia Courtney's paintings of trees. The method she uses to paint with palette knives, which gives the painting a lot of texture, caught my attention a lot and so i decided to try something similar.
At that point in my life i just wanted to try as many things as i could, experiment with different surfaces, media, and method of applying it. This time i wanted to try painting with pallet knives, something i was completely new at.
I chose to make my painting monochromatic because i wanted to concentrate not on the color of the image but on its texture.