I want to show some of my paintings as they progressed. The first one i want to show is called "If I Become Cheap You'll Respect Me". It began as both a challenge to myself to create a painting from a drawing, without the use of a photographic source, and as a way of really finding how i wanted to begin painting the body of work for my MFA thesis exhibition. Here is a photograph of the painting in it's first stage:
As you can see there are some drawing problems, and it's very flat. But again, I based the painting off of a 4" x 7" drawing, and only allowed myself 3 weeks to complete the piece, (which was another aspect of the challenge) by far the shortest amount of time i've had to complete a large painting (approximately 3' x 5').
There are aspects of it that i think are very interesting, and many people claimed to see a connection to Italian renaissance painting, specifically noting Pierro della Francesco (am i spelling that right? and i am unsure that i fully see the connection at this time)
Regardless, at a certain point I needed to make major changes to it, I couldn't let it remain an artifact of an experiment, so I made alterations to the cartoon like face and altered the color of the tile floor:
