In October 2013 just starting the first semester of the final year, I knew I wanted to paint emotions from my subjects faces and wanted to experiment using colour to indicate what the emotion is. The piece titled ‘Invidia’ is a portrait of my course friend Laurel and the painting is to evoke envy. There’s the phrase ‘green with envy’ so I went along with that aspect. I photoshopped the original image that I took on a Canon 550D camera, and added a green tint to the fleshy tones. When painting the piece techinically it was difficult, i found it challenging to paint fleshy tones with a tint from another colour, I was worried about the colour of the paint going muddy. I decided to use a mixture of green paints, and I think the end result was successful. What I would of done differently is to make the emotion less obvious so i would paint just hints of green in the face rather using it as a tint. After painting this I really like how monotone the painting is, so I would like to experiment further with this. The scale of the piece is A0 I felt it was a great size because the face is the main focus point, and the face appeared larger when I started to paint . i think the painting would create an impact in a space.
After finishing painting it, I realised when I cover the half the face with a piece of paper, each eye and shape of the mouth indicate two completely different emotion but overal has one emotion. To our left the eye show upset and betrayal and to the right the eye show more anger. So the overall emotion of jealously seems to be the right emotion.
Yan Pei Ming’s paintings are very expressive and to me are aestheically pleasing to look at. I haven’t seen his work visually in person, but I like all the mark making and texture he used, and interested to see his process of painting.
