Well, I thought I would update you as to the situation regarding my art project. I bought a really big brush that I used to do another coat on top of the black. Ridiculous, you say? Perhaps, except for that my small-brush technique left me with awkward streaks of matte and shine spots that looked pretty downright terrible. Another coat with a larger brush effectively removed this difficulty and made for a much cleaner matte-like finish. I did this some time ago, however, and in end-of-year insanity which ensues every May, the poor canvas got pushed to a corner and forgotten.
Fear not! I found it, though! Well, I never actually lost it, per se. I actually got tired of the guilt looks its been shooting me as I look at it every night, berating me for not working on it. Along with a thousand other unfinished art projects. So it kind of got pushed away in the muddled noise of my subconscious. I am still really excited about the whole project, though, so I finally got back into it before a bunch of other ones. After finally getting sick of waiting for my grandma to decide if she was willing to brave her insanely messy basement in search of my mom's old violin, I resorted to google images for sketching.
I first noticed how different a real violin is to how I imagine one. I mean, think about it. You can probably imagine roughly what a violin looks like. If you can't, I'm sorry. If you successfully got an approximate image, though, now go find a violin in google images. See what I mean? No? Okay, I admit I'm insane. I'm sorry. But still, I realized that this is going to be a lot more detailed and just intense to paint than I originally realized. You see, I am not only painting a violin, it is going to be broken in half and light exploding from the inside. I am still toying with the ideas of dripping blood or words or something else to add to the symbolism.
This painting is, as I mentioned before, from the book Night by Elie Wiesel. Juliek, another Jew rotting in a concentration camp, has a violin and dies while playing his heart out. My painting will have the violin broken in half to symbolize the cruelly shortened life of this beautiful soul, and the light symbolizing all sorts of things: the life he will never life, the dreams which died with the Nazis, the artist's spirit which defined him and could not be killed, and an inner light that I believe God created everyone with. With the breaking of his body and the ending of his life, the pure light of his short life is released in a blinding array of purity. The broken violin is symbolism for his ended life, in a 'Van Gogh's chair' sort of self-portrait (that's an art reference.... sorry).
Maybe I am getting too deep with all this...
But my point is that I have to not only draw a violin, but a broken one. That means broken wood, as well as getting the perspective right for the broken bits and doing it all without an active model of a broken violin. Idk, maybe google images will have broken violin pics too... But on top of that, I am painting light, one of the main arch-nemeses of artists everywhere. Light, reflections, faces, shadows, shiny objects.... yeah, not fun. It wouldn't be that bad, except for that I DONT KNOW HOW TO PAINT LIGHT!!!!!!!!!! yeah, the flaws in this grand plan keep on coming.... I just hope I can patch the holes before the whole project sinks to the bottom of the Sea of Good Ideas, where it will die a painful, lonely death.
I did start the sketch on the canvas. Idk how to get a pic on her though. Maybe I will have figured out how by the time I actually get more done on this and post again.
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