rauschenberg

influences: 

critique:

I had absolutely no idea where to start on this project due to rauschenberg’s lack of any sort of theme in his pictures.  Whenever I start to compose a portrait, I set out with a pre-determined theme that i want to clearly depict to the potential audience.  Needless to say this first venture into abstract art was going to be a challenge for me.  I finally decided that I would pick my favorite element out of five different rauschenberg pieces and incorporate them into my collage.  In the first piece, I loved the way that he faded a black and white building into the background of the picture. It was subtle, yet it added a unique texture that was hard to avoid once you noticed it.  I chose to use the coliseum, the eiffel tower, and a chinese pagoda as my buildings.  I figured that my theme would simply be things that I enjoy in my life, and these are three places I hope to visit someday.  In the second piece, I was simply soothed by the subtlety of the watercolors that were randomly painted over the canvas.  However, I felt that I wanted a little more bite in my picture, so I used slightly more vibrant colors and basically scribbled them over a couple of the smaller pictures I had incorporated at the top of my piece.  This successfully captures his madness while looking like there was still a thought process behind the mayhem.  Moving on to picture number three, I quite literally stole the idea of placing a palm tree somewhere on the canvas.  In mine, however, I opted to make the palm tree a brighter color because a palm tree reminds me of a sunny, laid-back beach, and I wanted the picture to reflect this.  Looking at it makes me urge to simply jump into my car and run away to San Diego, and I hope that any other beach lovers will feel the same way.  Stepping forward to picture number four, this is probably the piece that most heavily influenced my work.  I attempted to emulate the way he desaturated Kennedy and then covered him in a solid color, which can be seen best on the instruments in the lower right hand corner.  I find that this effect can keep a picture from becoming yet another black and white layer, while taking out some of the colors that would contrast the color scheme of the rest of the canvas.  It also draws the viewer’s eyes to the smaller details so that they aren’t overlooked.  In the fifth and final picture, I was inspired by the way he imported images, although most of them are hard to see, and then covered them in extremely vibrant colors to add an excitement to the picture.  However, I felt like keeping the painting effect to a minimum, so I simply adjusted the hue of the two main pictures to make them look surreal and distorted, which resembles more what raushenberg was intending to do as opposed to the end result.  Regardless, I appreciated the end result as it made rather plain scenic portraits more interesting, and for lack of a better word, twisted, the most obvious aspect of almost any of his pieces.  A few other details I incorporated without any outside inspiration, such as the snowflake.  I simply felt that the contrast between this and the sunny disposition of the rest of the picture would definitely capture the viewer’s attention.  After all, one of the glories of abstract art is that it doesn’t necessarily have to make sense- if I felt something would look good I simply incorporated without a second thought.  The end result, although perhaps not as artistic as rauschenberg himself, really gave me a sense of self-satisfaction.  I felt that the piece really described who I am in an abstract way, which was extremely important to me.  It will never be possible to describe a person with words, they are far too abstract in themselves.  In a sense this type of artwork allows you to skip the physical aspects of a person and skip straight to the thought process, which is really the purpose of art in my opinion.  Truly the only thing I didn’t like was that it didn’t really resemble a rauschenberg piece as much as I would have liked it too.  If I were to do it again, I would probably attempt to be even more random in choosing what pictures I include, and use more of the painting over desaturated pictures effect.  However, I am extremely pleased with how this piece turned out, and it was really relieving to see how much of a departure from my normal work I am capable of making.

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