Projects in Painting

In 2022, I took the class projects in painting with Professor Vikram Divecha. It was a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with my love of oil painting, which I had not taken serious time to pursue since completing my AP Art portfolio in 2018.

I wrote a short artist statement for our final presentation to go along with my final artwork:

Artist Statement:

Within my own lifetime, digital photography has become a dominating aspect of daily life. With increased digital accessibility and the creations of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, the influence of digitization has bled so deeply into the way we think about art that the future of analog artistic mediums has been thrown into a realm of uncertainty. In this piece I wished to explore the relationship between digital photography and painting in order to demonstrate and even defend the position of traditional art forms within the modern context. Specifically, I wanted to challenge the dominance of either digital or analog artwork by using digital photography and software as a tool to improve my artistic process while enhancing the work through the act of painting. I created the reference image by compositing four photographs in Photoshop. After this I painted the background using traditional techniques such as glazing and underpainting to reveal the complex and colorful relationships between different areas of the image. Finally, I used a laser cutter to create stencils that allowed me to apply paint cleanly to the top layer and give the piece a particular layering effect.