Painting #4- Hu.mil.i.a.tion
About two weeks ago in one of my studio classes, the teacher chewed me out in front of the whole class over something that didn't really make sense. It made me cry. I identified that feeling as humiliation.
Humiliation is defined as making (someone) feel ashamed and foolish by injuring their dignity and self-respect, especially publicly.
I decided to use this feeling as the topic of my painting. I planned to create a painting over a collage on a wooden cradle board. My work was inspired by Laslo Antal, a collage artist. He started a daily art project called "Visual Diaries" in which he creates a collage every day based on something that happened that day, a narrative. I chose the incident with the art studio teacher as my narrative. Scroll to the bottom to read more about the meaning of this piece.
Here I sketched out my composition onto my substrate, a wooden panel 11x14.
I then used old book pages to collage the scales onto the body.
I like to add a little color, just lightly here and there around the piece. Watered-down acrylic ink.
I used a baby wipe to clean up and transfer some of the acrylic ink.
I used black oil paint and black oil pastel to create the heavy lines around the monster figure and blended them into the painting. I also used them to darken her hair and the features of the monster.
I used green sap and crimson oil paint to give the scales a little more color and to help them be more visually noticed. I used oil pastels for the lips, teeth, and eye. The girl's dress was also painted white.
I then added a very tiny amount of the sap green and the crimson to her white dress to add shadow and dimension. I added Gold Leaf to the scales to emphasize them and to make them seem almost like dragon scales.
The monster figure takes up almost the entire space and encircles the human form. The eye is anthropomorphized to represent that this is a real person, her teeth bared. The human form in the center is feeling humiliated. She throws up her hand as her only form of protection. And when the monster figure is gone, she still hides the tears that are angrily being pent up not allowing them to flow down her cheeks in front of everyone.
