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Just a random photo I took on my camera like 4 years ago forgot about and only now finally got around to editing.

(I’m lowkey obsessed… it makes me so nostalgic)

Texture is really important in art… obviously. (I mean our teacher spent a whole term studying it with us) Here are some study sketches I did because why not? It looks cool.

“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” – Wayne Dyer

My artwork is based off of this quote and a series of floral still life works created by Edouard Manet. The works of his were created to symbolise the importance of outward beauty and how something so beautiful distracts us from everything that’s going on around us. This is represented by the contrast in colours that I have used to show how beauty can distract us from what is really happening.

The original photo was of dying flowers and in the sketch that I created this is represented and emphasised by the lack of colour. However, by adding colour to the same sketch you get a painting that looks alive and it is easy to forget that it used to not be there.

The use of cool colours as a background make the flowers pop forward and come to life. This is also done by mixing up using complementary and tertiary colours together. The choice of using acrylic allowed me to create a painting that popped through the use of bright colours and texture and paint in a fauvist style. This style greatly depends on everyone’s personal feelings and perspective which is representative of Dyer’s quote.

The choice of layering the background shows how there are many layers to life and the flowers represent the worlds beauty. By including flowers that have not yet opened I symbolised a hope and the start of life; however if you were to look at the sketch it would show a life lost too early, one that had not yet been fulfilled.

Because, if we have something that we use to filter our perception for example the knowledge that everyone is going through different trials and stages of their life we can start to see things clearly. Dyer’s quote shows that how look at something effects our perspective. This was also recognised by Manet as he used the visual oxymoron of something that is beautiful that distracts us from the horrible things happening in the world.

My aim in this artwork was to show how drastically our view can change through our perspective. As well as brightly painting dead flowers to create the illusion that they are alive, the deliberate action of leaving the flower stalks behind the glass cup green and ‘normal’ reflects that we all view things differently (hence, the bright colour of everything else).

(In conclusion, I had to make it sound fancy for school, really the flowers were just pretty. It wasn’t that deep.)