Childhood, relationships, and restaurants. Finally done this final!

These are the final paintings. I'm going to rework three of them over the summer, but this is what I turned in as my final for Elements of Visual Thinking.

They are about my childhood and growing up in a Chinese restaurant and the relationships I formed in it with the customers and my family.

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ELEMENTS Final: WIP so far

CLICK ON THE PHOTOS FOR ENLARGEMENTS, ESPECIALLY THE BEFORE AND AFTER PICTURES.

Together right now I have 4 paintings near completion, this is them alltoether.



The latest with some before and after.. sort of.



And my favourite painting so far is this one... with all the stages of the faces that gave me so much grief this past week.

And the final outcome is:


I feel like all of them are coming a long way.

from my childhood series

There is something very exciting about watching a painting progress. After weeks of fretting and stressing over this project I feel like I'm finally getting it.

I feel like these paintings are slowly involving into something else. They're not only about my childhood spent at a restaurant in rural Carroll County nor just the fairytales I used to pour over inside the dingy closet at the back of the room. Something about these pieces frightens me, but I don't know what it is.

Some close up shots, and a sketch or two...



Look at how creepy these sketches are! Maybe it's a foreshadowing of my forthcoming doom.
Juuuust kidding, but really... are my paintings taking on a sinister feel? Or is that just me?

Drawing final: WIP

I restarted this piece twice- it used to be much, much smaller.



Both panels are 56" wide. The white part will be cut off. It started off with a fairytale, there were going to be elements and characters of various fairytales included throughout the piece, but it has since evolved into a landscape. Maybe. I'm thinking there will be 3 panels total, unless I find time for more.

Finals have brought me so much heartache these past few weeks.

This was Andrew's rendition of my original chip board. It was so wonderful!! The chip board was cut up and made into a box and a halogen light bub was added because the way I had painted the chip board reminded him of water and just flow.

It's funny because the way he thinks artistically is so different from the way I do.

It's so lovely! It made me really happy, and he let me have it.


And since I had Colin;s piece.... this is what his looked like. His was a performance piece, instead of painting over the original chip oard, he bought another one and sat on top of them with a sheet over him.

and my end result with the functionality of a book.
So here's the cover.

And the outside.


acrylic, watered down gesso, sheet music, and fabric were my additions.

This is a piece I did for my Elements of Visual Thinking class.

Everyone bought a 30x40in chip board and an oil bar, we layed the boards out as a grid (17 of them) and drew whatever we want, wrote whatever we want, did whatever we wanted with these boards until our oil bar sticks ran out.

The result wasn't how I had imagined it.

But everyone took a board home and recreated it into their own art pieces. So this is mine. There are still hints of the oil bar peeking through all the acrylic paint.

After we brought it to class, we took someone else's by picking a number.

Andrew has mine, I'll take a picture and post his result.

This project is based on a reading by Roland Barthes "Death of the Author."