With the idea of using certain tools to express my emotion I thought I should start a textured portrait of myself and see what happens. The day I started the portrait I felt quite angry and frustrated and I wanted get that frustration out by using a palette knife as my tool. The first image shows the first five minutes of painting, I applied the paint quite harshly and started mixing colour over colour, the palette knife as quite wide so it made it quite textured. What I like at that stage was the colours are blending together which I think gives it more character. After that I painted for the rest of the day and was intriuged to see how it would look by the time I finish. I can see me in the painting but I can’t really feel the true expression of what the emotion from the photograph was, the photograph shows me being upset and for me personally I cannot see that, but the colours and the marks made from the paint give that emotion.
I felt that I rushed the painting to much and I was not sure whether the scale works well with the power of the emotion. So at that point my ideas changed dramatically…
Painting a textured piece was quite daunting for me as it is not usually my style so I decided to smeer over the painting with a paint brush with white spirit to give that Richter look of his blurred images but blurred it so much that, that emotion then becomes more unknown. The end result finished with a streaky canvas with a range of colours along with the muddy blue to represent the emotion the best. I can still see me in the canvas but at that point I decided not to do anymore to it. My friends were shocked I done that to the canvas after having nice feedback before I smeered over it. But to be honest I still felt I made the right decision to do that, because it is about the traces of paint with this canvas.
