Kiss and Make-Up

The aforementioned compilation, in the style of the eerily prophetic Andy Warhol.

Mucha Mucha

After an insane amount of hours, my self-portrait is finito at last. It's rendered after the image beside it by Alphonse Mucha. I will be posting some lengthy comments on the piece tomorrow as well as the source images. As always, click to enlarge. Good night!

UPDATE: Some thoughts...

I’ll begin with some comments on why I was drawn to Alhponse Mucha’s work to begin with. Quite simply, I think it’s beautiful. It’s illustrative, colourful and romantic. I think it struck a chord with me because it looks like the doodles and sketches I do outside of school or work or anything. Like my sketches, his works are girlie and wistful, and have this kind of Parisian elegance to them. I regards to the style, there are things Mucha does that I do myself – the heavy stroke around the dress and body, the exaggerated drapery, the soft but dramatic shading. The final reason for choosing Mucha is because he was an artist, but a commercial one. He avoids the line between high and low art by simply makes lovely images regardless of whether he’s drawing for himself or for a client. A lot of his work is advertising, but it’s all art.

I chose to imitate this particular image because I love the panel composition and the autumnal palette; it’s rich and very pleasing. Now that I’m looking at the completed image, I’ll be honest – nothing about the woman portrayed is very “Julie”, the face being the only exception. I certainly don’t find myself standing on pedestals robbed in silk and surrounded by floating leaves and flowers that came right out of a 60’s drug-induced vision. This portrait is not a gritty representation of personal emotional turmoil or a realistic portrayal of the spots and speckles in my complexion and the flyways in my hair. This portrait is a representation of some ideal Julie, that can really only exist on a screen. But I’m an idealist at heart, and I think it’s okay for artists to get lost once and a while.

That said, I’m still not completely comfortable with this piece. In a way, it’s ironic that the reason I chose to recreate a Mucha piece was because it was beautiful advertising. As it stands now, I’m almost uncomfortable with applying his rules of beauty and style to a picture of myself – it doesn’t quite fit. I’m not completely at ease with the image of myself as some foreign flower goddess. With that said, the second piece I created for my computer art final, “Kiss and Make-Up” makes perfect sense. It is a Warholian homage that became a commentary on the modern view of women in our air-brushed, celebrity saturated age.

It’s really quite nice when connections create themselves, isn’t it? I’ll post that video in just a moment.