Schematic Design Process

The painting I chose was from Tom McNease and it's called New Image.  This painting keeps the viewer's attention.  It's very interesting.  The feeling of calm and relaxation is sensed.  Some may think of water or a wave, ice or frost when they look at it.  McNease uses paint that is not specified.  He specializes on transferring paint from glass to board which is in this case.  When using glass as the medium, it causes unique arrangements with the paint.  It's not certain that it's intentional or not.

The lines are thin and smooth.  They are slightly curvilinear and used to break up the patterns that the paint makes being being on the glass.  The patterns are mostly organic shapes that can either look like coral, or the composition of a snowflake or frost.

The color is expressive, mostly vibrant with very small muted shades of grey and violet.  The dominant color is blue and it's a cool color, however there are some elements of red in the painting throughout.  This helps it not be so cool and towards the bottom, the mixture of blue and red are making a soft violet color appear.  It's the dark blue areas that give it depth.

There is no appearance of a light source in this abstract piece; however there is a good amount of white that is interplayed in the composition.  This brightens and breaks up the heavy blue blotches of paint and gives the work some room to breathe since there is so much blue.

There is a sense of depth in this piece.  Some of the white thin lines bring the viewer into a vortex that is focused to the left middle of the painting.  This creates some depth to the work of art.  There is an important observation that sticks very obvious in this work.  Ther is a perfect circle in the vortex.  This can be referred to as a close-up zoomed in detail inside of a bubble.  This conveys definite precision in a geometric element, to a work that is very abstract and random.  This is what draws the viewer to see this open window detail.

There is definitely movement to the painting.  The eye is drawn upward and around clock wise.  With regards to the name of the composition, "New Image", it looks like the birth of anew idea and that it possibly is contained in the bubble circle.

This work certainly depicts contemporary art and the Louisiana artist himself.  His work is environmentally derived and uses a unique paint transfer process of which he keeps private.  He also focuses on expressionistic imagery and this piece reflects that.

 

These sketches are what I pulled apart through the painting.  I see two elements that stand out strongly.  The first is line and the second is texture. The left sketch is both line and texture.  The middle on is mostly line and the third sketch on the right is all texture.

When I overlayed my sketches, I came up with many different abstract configurations. The first on the left,I emphasized line and I played with pattern to created a radial symmetry.  I took the element of the circle and put it in the center.  The second overlay in the middle depicts the organic shapes that I zoomed in on through the texture sketches.  I used a thinner pen to specialize the detail of the lines within the organic shape. The third focuses more on line and shape and taking two elements and seeing how they create a relationship together.  There is balance in this particular overlay between the two circular shapes.  I found a piece that would join the two and it created a fan like appeal. 

Pictures on my models will be coming soon!