I had a fun time making this artwork. The prompt for it came from last week's
Pikaland assignment in which we had to make a new artwork based on an element from a known one (or one in a gallery, but I was never going to make it to a gallery before the assignment due date!). I spent a few nights leafing through
The Art Book, which was a wonderful experience in itself. I've never had any formal training in Fine Art or Art History and so it's really exciting to be exploring all of these great artworks (and I want to do more of this!).
Anyway, it took a while to narrow down which artwork I would draw inspiration from but I was really struck by the symbolic work of
Jean-Michel Basquiat. Most of my work tends to be in a realistic style so I wanted to try my hand at making an artwork of symbols and also using a colour palatte I don't usually use. I was also thinking about the work of
Flora Bowley and
Belinda Kemp when I made this.
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| Jodi Wiley - Untitled (acrylic on canvas) |
Some of the images are a little clunky (the elephant, the meerkat at the bottom) but on the whole, I kind of like it. And what makes it even more special is that every image here represents our personal story as a family. Here are a few of the symbols: the elephant is from a made-up bedtime story Kim tells Miss P every night. The meerkat represents JJ, our 8-month-old bub, because she likes to check out what's going on at all times in a very meerkat-like way. There's one of our chooks on the bottom right and a couple of images which represent the Japanese maple we planted as a family. The two little pinks dots in the top middle are our daughters' thumb prints. There's more, but I might be boring you with this...So while it might not hang in the National Gallery, I think we'll hold onto this one just for sentimental reasons.
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