Art 3 Final: Reflection Essay

Over the course of the year, I feel I have grown in considering the overall composition and mark of my work. At the beginning of the year, my compositions were pretty random and I arranged objects in a still life until they just "felt right." This manner of arranging compositions was very sporadic and unreliable. In addition, I didn't really consider my "mark" or any forms in my work and instead simply explored markmaking as I developed a piece. I feel that both of these practices evolved significantly over the year. When planning my first project, my self portrait, I tried to pay close attention to the composition, and in particular, to the negative space surrounding the figure. This project also forced me to truly plan and consider the mark I would make before my pencil hit the paper, as I completed an artist copy prior to diving into the self portrait. This emphasis on composition and mark led me to carefully plan my fantastic four projects. In my "head" project, I specifically considered the composition. How should I angle and overlap the shoes to create visual interest with positive and negative space? How can I use the lines of the floor and wall to emphasize the shoes and create dimension? In terms of the overall greatest growth, I find that I have grown the most compositionally, as I started without regarding composition at all and proceeded to consider it in every succeeding work. In my "heart" project, I established my mark before I started to work. I wanted to layer colored pencils lightly at first but then increase the pressure to create a vibrant piece. I tried my best to follow through on this plan, slowly layering colored pencil marks, until I was proud of the final piece.

However, I feel that I still need to improve in painting, especially in terms of blending and layering. Our third project of the year, painting a still life with oil paints, proved to be particularly challenging for me, as I had never seriously painted a still-life nor merely touched a tube of oil paint. I tried my best to put in the work on this project, but my final painting still felt flat and dull. Pretty soon after completing this work, I realized that if I wanted to improve my painting, I needed to practice. I enrolled in a painting class at the Visual Arts Center and completed another oil painting over the course of five weeks. Although I did feel significantly more comfortable with oil painting by course’s end of the course, I needed to practice and complete many more paintings before I would be truly happy with a work. I really enjoy oil painting and love how the paints blend so effortlessly, and I definitely would like to continue practicing with the medium to improve in the future.

As school ends and summer begins, I can use my new knowledge in composition and mark and my wish of improvement with oils to further my independent work in the coming years. I enjoyed depicting different styles of shoes with my fantastic four projects and “play pages,” so I hope to continue to detail these objects in a couple of my future works. As I suggested in the previous paragraph, I hope to practice oils this summer, but my exposure to the importance of mark makes me particularly excited for this medium. I mainly attempted to use oils to depict realism throughout the year, but I am also interested in deliberately creating non-realistic marks with oils as well, perhaps using an impressionist mark or one like the abstract expressionists. In addition, I feel that my awareness of composition will help me create balanced still life paintings, hopefully with shoes and other objects, as I get to work this summer.