If i become cheap, you'll respect me

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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:

That being said, i didn't intend to change any of the body because i thought that it was at least a decent representation of a human form (and i didn't believe i would have the time because of the ever approaching MFA thesis Exhibition) but once i started changing the face i saw a problem with the nipples and belly button, and then i looked at the genitals and the legs and the tub around him and basically decided to completely overhaul the image, though i imagine to most people the final image looks it was merely tweaked. But at this point in the paintings evolution i am very satisfied with the result.

I have also include two studies i did after i "finished" the first time, because i was unsure that i chose the exact right image, each is 15" x 10"