Look more closely at the hair of the painting in the model. It's real hair. That isnt a painting on canvas, its a painting of a girl in a mac.. On a girl in a mac. Yep! It's model covered in paint; the highlights and shadows turned into lovely acrylic smears so that she looks like she's flat on a canvas. See more here.Every time I begin to think that we've run out of ideas, that art is becoming monotonous, artists like Alexa Meade - this talented woman - come up with something so simple yet so impressive and deceptive to the eye. I love it. Whilst many of us look to new technologies to come up with new, original ideas, Meade simply paints what she sees - ON what she's seeing - and the effect really is an odd but interesting one on the brain.
It's always the case that as soon as the exam season begins, my procrastination for art suddenly decides to make itself scarce and I'm all for getting covered in paint and graphite and bits of thread again, or plugging in my Wacom tablet and spending hours hunched over my laptop, scribbling away. Meanwhile, the sad layer of dust on my revision timetable begins to accumulate. Guaranteed, every summer. Try as I might to work the two around each other, I always end up breaking open the acrylics in the afternoon and finally putting my brushes and palette down in the wee hours of the next morning. Recently I've been inspired by the album art of the band Baroness:
The complexity is not in the colour but in the linework, which is also where the shading detail is worked in. The lovely womanly figures are eerie and aloof and surrounded by not so pleasant symbolism. My attention span is far too short to produce something as detailed as this, and besides; with the reminder that I do have exams to study for stuffed somewhere in a recess in my brain, I figured I dont have enough time for putting in great complexity. This is what I produced:
Overall I'm pleased. I figured she'd look better if I gave her unhumanly colours. Grey and washed out red seem to contrast and complement the off-white of her eyeballs nicely (Ha-ha.) The image took perhaps 45 minutes in all, leaving me enough time to contemplate revising, and perhaps admit to exam failure...But at least I could make it as one of those street artists, right?
