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A very early painting

MARCH 11, 2009
This is a painting I did back when I was 18, one of my early attempts at painting with oil.  When I was in high school, there wasn’t much money to buy art supplies, so I mostly worked with pencil on paper or watercolors.   When I went into my first year of college at Pratt, my color and design teacher, Mary Buckley, started giving us assignments.  She was mostly concerned about composition and color and left the technique up to us.   She didn’t teach us “how” to paint, which, in the long run, I think was a good thing, though it was frustrating at the time.   She let us make mistakes and find our own way of painting.  
I went ahead and bought some cheap bristle brushes, oil paint and turpentine.   I later found out there were things such as mediums that would have made things work better.  I had a composition in mind, I think, which was a family scene, maybe a portrait of my grandparents and myself.   I was recently talking with Yuko and the subject of using mirrors to look at our own faces for reference came up and that’s how I remembered this painting.  Most of the faces here look like my face because I was looking at a small mirror when painting them.   A little odd.   I intended to do a full fledged rendered painting over the anatomical drawing, but I never finished it.   I always had a hard time reconciling the appearance of reality on a flat 2D surface.   I got into ideas of Cubism and Abstract Expressionism and that’s probably why my work got flatter and less modeled with time.  I don’t keep many things around, but I have this painting up in a corner of my studio.  It was a bit of a starting point.
 
© 2024 Edel Rodriguez