Figures

A collection of paintings I made in my Advanced Painting class while attending the University of California, Irvine. The rules of this project were simple: create a series of at least five paintings, all with a coherent theme, and having at least two of the five paintings having a dimension of five feet or more. I decided to create five large paintings, all having a height of three feet, and have them connect to form a large timeline of the earth. I decided to use oil as my primary medium for this project because of its vibrant colors and unique mixing properties and textures. A medium I explored the most throughout this project was the oil stick. I discovered that having a graphic quality to painting was possible with the oil stick, as for many instances in the paintings I would have illustrated sections or drawn on top of painted areas. I also wanted to experiment with collaged sections, achieved with gessoed brown paper ripped from my Chipotle takeout and drawn on with charcoal and black and white conté. I picked up this strategy from my Drawing I class and wanted to integrate it to create these multi-media paintings. I assigned each painting a specific color theme to make their palettes more cohesive. When going from left to right, the assigned colors were yellow, green, blue, magenta, and orange. I tried to reach a delicate balance within each painting where the underpainting colors would poke out.
When tackling the idea of making a timeline of the earth, I knew I wanted to have each of the five paintings cover different periods. Starting from the left, Figure 1 covers the ancient world, pre-humanity. It is teeming with life, with sea creatures from the Cambrian Period in the foreground and dinosaurs roaming the forest behind and within the fossil bed. A sense of impending doom is felt with the meteor falling in the distance and the volcano about to erupt with lava. Figure 2 encompasses the first civilizations within recorded human history and the many human concepts this time birthed: storytelling, myths, legends, the first writing and drawing, agriculture, and major buildings and structures. Figure 3 is the present. The reference I used was from a hike my friends and I did, and I wanted to highlight the beauty of the earth and our place within it. Figure 4 is where we are headed in the near future. A world overrun with pollution and human consciousness being uploaded to become artificial intelligence. Figure 5 is a distant apocalyptic future, with the world crumbling apart as a black hole encompasses everything around it. For the future paintings especially, I wanted to convey themes of sustainability and protecting our planet. The earth is our home, and if our personal choices and big businesses continue in their ways, we will experience our downfall in the future. In the illustrated collaged sections, the name of each painting can be found. I wanted to reference the style of scientific illustrations, often noted with "Fig. #" to say that this whole series is a scientific entry.