About a month ago I was informed that the art department was going to participate in this year’s homecoming. None of my professors actually specified what we were going to do, so I was just going along with whatever they said. Apparently, everyone was going to paint a picture of the campus. Combined, they would create a glorious landscape of bricks and trees. Then they also had a mural planned, which they did not specify on.
It all felt like a rush because the planning for the event seemed to escalate over time. We were all oh so busy around the building with multiple projects happening simultaneously. Surprisingly, we were able to manage our class projects with our homecoming projects. We were also given class time to do these projects, which helped greatly.
The first project was a painting of the landscape. I decided to go out onto the campus and find the perfect spot. I really wanted to do the power plant, so I went and sat at George street residence hall and stared at it for a while. How would I remember this moment? How would I be able to record this onto the canvas? I drew very rough onto the canvas trying to capture the quick rustic look of the brick buildings before the sun set. I met one nice grad student who offered me his charcoal, I declined but it was a nice gesture. Just goes to show how nice of a place the power plant on campus is; even the people are nice.
Now that I had my drawing it was time to paint the picture. I didn’t have that much experience painting landscapes. This was my first time in college actually painting a landscape. I started with the furthest thin in the background, which was the sky. I tried to emulate the motions of the clouds, which were thin and flaky. The rest of the scene was a bit of a hassle. There was something going on everywhere in the piece. I didn’t use any fine brushes, so the initial painting was a bit rough, which made the process all the more frustrating. The hardest part was that I took a picture that I used to record the colors, but it was disproportionate from my drawing. I had to make a compromise and find a common ground.
The colors were also a challenge. Honestly, most of the picture looked red or gray. I had to use my artist intuition to find the colors that seeped through the gray. There was a ot of blue and yellows used, and I tried to paint it in a way that made it look three dimensional.
After many layers of application, I finally completed the painting. Our next task was to paint a huge mural pertaining to black lives matter. We had to pose onto a wooden slab and get outlined. Then with those outlines we painted black silhouettes. After those life size paintings were done we took oil pastels and drew the names of all the fallen black lives onto the board.
It was very impactful to see this created. Laying there were innocent bodies, dead. It was very uneasy and nothing I would’ve done myself. It is very literal and blunt, which is not my style, but it was interesting collaborating with my fellow artist.
