Latest Artwork

I was actually intending to do a series of self portraits, but luckily I decided not to, because upon my return to university it turned out that I had to do self portraits all the time. For this task the portrait didn't have to be representational, but somehow I find myself unable to do non representational work. 

Instead I decided to "deconstruct" my face - starting with a realistic feather painting, than gradually doing more paintings subtracting more elements and realism until I was left with virtually nothing.

I had two days, but I knew I would only be able to use one (as the next week I would be in convalescence because I had to get my wisdom teeth out.) Unfortunately..I work far too fast. I was finished all the paintings by midday.

My starting point. This one took me the longest, naturally - probably about 40 minutes.

I'm trying to put these in descending order from "most realistic" to "least realistic" but sometimes it can be a little muddy. I also intended to go from large feathers down to tiny ones, but that got a bit muddy too. However my first feather is significantly larger than my last.

I'm beginning to lose my facial features. The first portrait is 5cm by 5cm on a cockatoo wing feather measuring 24cm by 5cm. The last portrait is 3mm by 1cm on a chicken feather measuring 6cm by 2cm.

 That was all very well but I still had a lot of time left over. So I did these:

I'm not sure how I managed to look so 70s. It isn't just the colour scheme (this, the small orange/yellow feather earlier, and the other feathers below are all hand dyed cockatoo feathers.)

The teacher suggested I deliberately split a feather. I burned the other one.

Finally, a "complimentary", inspired by my classmate's typewriter.

So..I'm not exactly sure how I arrived at this idea but I decided to paint some feathers again..and I decided to paint some trinketty rubbishy colourful cheap and nasty sort of circusy stuff.

first this carousel horse. I got a bit lazy on the mane. Reference from creative commons The photo is more beautiful than my painting..but it isn't too easy to paint on a feather so I'll give myself that much.

This one's from a little still life I set up; a bird skull and beads. I have no idea where the skull is from, I just found it one day. It doesn't have a beak attached..but it definitely seems more avian than rodent, and it's probably only a couple of cm long/wide.

 This one seems more impressionist than the other two. It's inspired by my father mistaking a picture of Alison Goldfrapp in a clown costume for a picture of a dog! (To be fair it was very low light when I showed him.) Not really any reference for the dog. The clown costume is much influenced by the album leaflet in Goldfrapp's Seventh Tree.

I've scrambled the order in which I painted them (cause it looked better.) The still life was first, the carousel horse second and the dog third.

 All three feathers are hand dyed cockatoo feathers, and each one is about 20cm long (including the shaft) and 5 cm wide. The images are painted on with acrylic paint.