It’s only fitting that this is the piece I should end on considering this was the first idea I worked out for my concentration and might even be my favorite. I never liked the portrayal of martyrs and saints throughout history undergoing let’s call it divine pleasure through their various encounters with death. In reality I’m almost positive their pain and anguish was all too real and simply just wasn’t expressive enough for me in classical portrayals of St. Sebastian or Peter or what have you. Even Bernini’s Martyrdom of St. Lawrence is a little too smug for me. So I got my friend Kevin, who was and is very much into death metal and things being as “brutal” as possible, to pose as my St. Sebastian. I always intended to photoshop in some arrows or bullet holes or something and people later asked me why I didn’t. The truth is I was lazy, I got an A and to this day idgaf.

I’m really proud of the joiner. It was meant to symbolize the brokenness of Sebastian’s body.

My friend Emma Shoots turned me onto these and I thought they were just about the coolest fucking portraits ever. So I tried my hand at making a mug shot.

I wasn’t allowed by our drawing and painting teacher (not my photo teacher might I clarify) Ms. Hogue to submit a physical copy of this subject, only digital, for fear that the AP reviewers would deem me insane and it would be detrimental to my final score. Did it anyways and got a 5 in spite of the bitch. This is based on the opera Pagliacci in which at the climax the titular character stabs his wife on stage for her infidelity and exclaims La Commedia è finita! – “The play is over!”.

Took this after seeing The Third Man for the first time.

I have a special spot in my heart for westerns and I’m a sucker for Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy. This is my take on the draw at high noon.

As the title states, these are two images are based on Degas’ portrayal of The Green Fairy and its effects.

In Spring of my senior year I took everything I’d learned in photography and developed a concentration for my portfolio. I’d always liked the idea keeping artwork narrative but allowing for relative interpretations in the eye of the beholder. The goal was to create works that told a story and were by no means abstract, but had no fixed narrative allowing the viewer to make up their own mind about what it was they were seeing. Take for instance any number of Tom Petty songs like “I Won’t Back Down”, “American Girl” or “Free Falling”. They’re whatever you make them out to be. Some of the pieces, however, convey specific subject matter which can be inferred from the titles, but take those away and they can be whatever you want them to be. If memory serves my concentration went something like: “To convey relative narratives through the use of studio lighting and effects”.

These constitute my AP Photography class for the fist part of senior year before I developed a concentration and began to build my portfolio (those pieces will follow in my next post). The first is a figure study making use of studio lighting. The following two are pinhole positives I took of a few friends in the Creative Writing Garden. There’s a few mushrooms and another depth of field image of my guitar. The next two together illustrate how hilarious Photoshop is. The assignment was to model a photo after a famous artist’s style and I chose the vivid color landscapes of Van Gogh. There’s an extreme close up of my friend Lisbeth, a self portrait with my guitar and one with light painting overlay. The last image is my take on Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat complete with me in a turban in the tub. Wooo! 

Senior year was an amazing time and an incredibly creative period for me and in printmaking I learned to love lithography. The nuanced subtleties of grinding a stone  and etching it into hydrophilic and hydrophobic areas to create an image was it for me. I’m a sucker for a challenge and there is no greater challenge for an artist than not being able to physically touch the piece you’re working on for fear of leaving oil on the surface. I miss the studio. I’d like to take a studio printmaking class at UCF for shits and gigs but that would be a waste of credits.

These first few prints are intaglio etchings of some plants and flowers. The two on the top are line etchings and the two on the bottom are aquatints with a bit more chiaroscuro.

Here is an ink and watercolor self portrait I did as the basis for a litho print that I wasn’t able to finish before the end of senior year but it’s pretty nice by itself.

These next two are completed lithographs based on old images of my grandfather in his youth. In January of my Senior year he passed away and it was emotionally devastating for me. He was a child of the Depression and worked his whole life to provide for his family. He was every bit the man I want to be and the one I looked up to most all my life. These were for him and in a way they helped me to cope with his departure. The first is him flexing for the camera and it’s printed black and whit then hand water colored to look sepia toned. The second, my personal favorite, shows him and my grandmother exchanging a tender kiss unaware of the camera.