Piece 5

Intention:

I knew I wanted to do a long horizontal piece as most of the pieces I have done so far are on the same dimensions. I also had an idea of featuring people walking to work, and the proportions of this piece suits this as I am able to include more figures and suggest the magnitude of the work force and how the majority of people experience the themes I am trying to present.

The main themes being the individuality lost when working for large large corporations. As they can impose norms, values, and expectations on individuals, often at the expense of their personal identity and uniqueness. I want to use a restrictive colour palette to further suggest this.

The process:

To create the long board was a challenge to begin with, my original idea was to try and find scrap MDF to use but i could not find any in the skip or workshop. INstead i created the strip out of the MDF I was using for the previous paintings, this did come with some challenges as if I simply stacked 3 pieces on top of eachother then stapled them together it would be structurally weak. I worked around this by first laying out 3 pieces of the wood lengthwise and then coving where the pieces meet with 2 pieces of mdf and then stapling them together, then attaching the final layer of three on top and stapling around the crack between the pieces to ensure it won't become loose or bend over time.

For the painting process, I layered thin layers of water soluble paint to create the people. I struggled with painting on this scale however, due to the fine details of the faces to overcome this I decided to put less emphasis and definition of the features as I think this would further suggest the loss of self.

THe evaluation:

I am overall happy with the piece, it was enjoyable to paint multiple figures on one canvas as in my paintings so far for this project it has been single characters or objects.
I am also proud how i was able to manage the challenges i came across and was able to navigate them successfully
Continuing from this piece I may want to play with the background more, like direction of stripes or incorporating the form of the shirt more like how in this piece i included the seam.

WEEK 5 + 6

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