Artist Research-

Sari Shryack

Shryack is an Austin-based painter focused on colour and light in the ever-changing neighborhoods of her community. The city is constantly evolving into new shapes and colors, and Sari seeks to capture this process in her work. She works primarily in acrylic paint and her colour palette is extensive in bright and vibrant tones. Her bright tones and unique style of capturing tone and light is something that drew me to her work, I really enjoy how brush strokes are visible in her work and she uses the shape of her brush to create something visually dynamic and appealing. I would also love to manipulate the colours of real objects to create something that would be more interesting and bright, I love working with a bright colour palette as i often draw portraits and use a more muted palette so the opportunity to use a bright colour palette is quite exciting for me so this is why her work stands out for me. She describes her processes as “acrylic landscape paintings to challenge the viewer to consider the elements of color and light both individually and as part of a compositional whole. With this process, my intent is to encourage a recalibration of the intrinsic value of place— how light and color everywhere ignites our ability to consume the world, and how that changes all the time… I choose colorful landscapes with familiar details as my settings, but crucially I also pick specific light and color interactions that serve to highlight transition…This work draws primarily from my personal experiences and my surroundings— this gallery is a representation of my emotional response to scenes that beg to be consumed, to be seen and heard. Color abstraction is my method of placing myself in the work, an allusion to my past that aligns with the work.”

Audrey Flack

Audrey Flack is an internationally acclaimed painter and sculptor and a pioneer of photorealism. Flack enjoys the distinction of being the first Photorealist painter whose work was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art for its permanent collection. Among many major museums around the world. Flack merges the excess of consumer culture with a skull similar to those found in 17th-century Flemish still-life paintings. “I always wanted to draw realistically,” she has explained. “For me art is a continuous discovery into reality, an exploration of visual data which has been going on for centuries, each artist contributing to the next generation’s advancement.” During the early part of her career Flack’s works were abstractions of color and line. It was not until the 1970s that the artist began to produce paintings based on images. I find her work to be very fascinating in both its rich colour and how many elements there are to look at. I really like environments that are packed with diverse colours and shapes and hers capture this which is why I am drawn to her work.

Zoey Frank

Zoey Frank is a distinguished young representational oil painter whose work includes perceptual painting, narrative and formal investigations. Frank’s paintings are modern in aesthetic but steeped in the academic understanding. The combination of a classical training and a more progressive contemporary theory has allowed Frank to use multiple techniques and approaches in one cohesive style. In her most recent paintings Frank has been painting mundane objects she encounters on a daily basis She states, “Painting these objects again and again in series mirrors how we engage with them: repetitively and towards a purpose.” Because the objects painted are unremarkable, Frank focuses on the shapes of the objects themselves and the patterns created in their surroundings. There is no grand narrative to distract from the designs. Frank explains, “Their very banality helps me to turn my focus away from the objects themselves and towards the image as a whole: the flat shapes, the balance of light and dark, and the interaction of color.” The result is paintings that are remarkably approachable and modern. Abstraction has entered Frank’s paintings in her attempt to focus on time and space. She says, “As compositional problems come up, I’ve started using arbitrary planes of color rather than objects to resolve them. This has freed me up to make intuitive changes while I’m painting. As I make changes to balance out the composition, the space of the painting becomes fragmented in a way that interests me.” That fragmentation helps make the most ordinary objects seem different and interesting. I find as mentioned to be wholly fascinating and I enjoy her approach to painting the thigs that she comes across in her daily life, it is something that has been an inspiration to me when thinking about collections of objects that I come across daily or hold some sort of strange significance.

Charcoal and wet studies-

I began fleshing out my ideas with some charcoal studies, this would help me reimagine the images in terms of light and dark and texture, in time this would help me with the creation of paintings. I found that I was able to make images that I was happy with and took some artistic license in terms of how I could see myself translating the images into paintings. I thought that referring to the reference images too closely would make the translations look too stiff and unoriginal. I was really excited after this to create some wet studies to bridge the gap between charcoal studies and painting. I used water soluble markers and Indian ink to start my wet studies, these are my favorite things to work with when making wet studies as I like how they bleed different colours when water is applied, it helped me figure out how I could translate light and dark with a wetter and less controlled media. I also used some black and white acrylic paint before painting my final pieces and I think this really helped me make some decisions on how I would display my paintings in terms of implying details without having to look too closely at the details presented in the image.

Final Paintings-

When beginning the painting process I found myself slowly loosen to the media as I used it more and I began to take more creative liberty with it as time went on. I really enjoy the outcomes of the paintings and how loose they look, I really like the large and obvious brush strokes that I used I think it makes them look more painterly and less stiff. I also took some liberty with the colour palette. With the images I wanted to show a range of simple household objects but paint them in such a way that makes them look unique and diverse, I think that I was able to show this pretty well with my paintings in the end. I completed 4 A2 paintings in total all of which have a slightly different colour palette and in my opinion I think that this diverse colour palette makes each painting look unique and stand out from one another. I’m really happy with how each painting turned out, I took a lot of inspiration from my chalk studies and wet studies which I think helped me make the paintings look the way in which i had envisioned.