14. Artist’s Choice

Objectives

This last color and design painting assignment is for you to do a painting of your choice that incorporates the principles you have learned over the semester. It’s a wide open option that will hopefully allow for you to enjoy your final project as much as possible and also allow for a bit more artistic freedom than our last few assignments could permit.


Lecture

This week’s assignment is intended to get back to the joy of painting and away from the confines of the purely technical assignments we have been doing lately. As stated above, it is completely wide open in terms of subject matter and form. However, at this point in the semester I do expect that everyone can connect the principles we’ve been studying and use the terminology we’ve learned along the way to describe what is happening – color theory wise – in your piece to others. For this week I’m asking you to post a photo of the artwork, but please do think about how you would write about the color and design aspects of it as that will be your final exam.

As some inspiration, here is a video clip of one of my favorite color artists discussing his work. Although James Turrell uses pure light and optical perception to create his works, rather than acrylics, I find him very interesting to listen to and observe. Please don’t let his use of the term “light” over and over confuse you. In many ways he’s really talking about “color” and the manner of color that we have been exploring in this class. Here is the direct link: https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s1/james-turrell-in-spirituality-segment/.


Activity
  1. On your 18″ x 24″ paper, please create a painting of your choice that reflects what you have learned through our various assignments this semester. Think about what you personally enjoy to paint and how you can directly apply our color and design experiences to it to make your piece as strong as possible.
  2. As usual, please post a photo your results in the comments section of the corresponding post, along with your thoughts on how the exercise went. (What went well? What did you struggle with? If you couldn’t mix a color and had to use one straight out of the tube, why do you think that was? Etc.)
  3. Also, this piece will be a component of your final exam. Your final exam will be a written essay about what you were trying to achieve, from a color and design perspective, in this piece.
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