Day 43: Dying.

This one comes with a long rambly story. Back at uni, if you walk through the backstreet route to my nearest Asda, you pass a house with a pear tree. For the whole of October, I always went that way and whenever I passed the house, there was a mound of rotting pears under the tree and it plays on my mind sometimes. It's just such a strong vivid image and every time I think about it, I am reminded of the pungent smell. Anybody who I talk to regularly, will probably have heard me ramble about that tree before.

Anyway, then a few days ago I started scribbling in my poetry book about a woman who planted a pear tree as a child and grew up with it but when she then dies, the pear tree carries on living, carries on producing fruit but as she is no longer there, the fruit builds up and decays. For some reason, I feel quite strongly about that image.

Enough ramble now. I hope you like it. It's not one of my best but it's not one of my worst either.

However, I do think that the background could do with a little more. But nevermind.

Day 42: Standing Still.

Mmhm. Long gaps, I know. This one is about unrequited love I suppose. Our lovely young lady is filled with adoration for the statue of Venus - the Godess of love - who continues to stand still and uninterested, unmoved by said adoration.

I imagined this one to be better than it turned out.

I used this stock image as a reference point for the girl because I momentarily fell in love with it. If you want to see some more beautiful ladies... clickherepls.

Day 41: Teamwork.

Yeah, Teamwork. I did this at least a month ago. Um, so I had a lot of trouble coming up with a visual idea for this one because personally, I am a bit of a loner and tend to work alone with everything I do. Well, usually anyway.

For this one I decided to look at insects because they're a really good example of extremely effectively teamwork. As it happens, last night I was rambling to Andrew on the phone about how amazing ants are and my rant got to a point where I started to feel really disillusioned and insignificant. That was pretty cool. Uh.

I did that colour invert thing here again where I decided what colour I wanted things to be and then painted it in the opposite colours so that when I inverted the colours, they appeared luminescent and eerie. I thought that fit the image quite well.

Day 40: Rated.

I took a really long time to get to this point. There were some technical issues here and there, basically revolving around me moving to university without a scanner or the last painting I had done. So for a while I got hung up on it and then a couple of weekends ago, I went ahead and did another picture for Rated, shortly before returning home and taking a photograph of the original one. Oh dear.

The new one looks at social ratings. It's about how your physical appearance can change where you fit into society, often determining whether you are at the top or the bottom of the pack. Being attractive can mean that people are nicer to you, more polite and friendly, whilst being unattractive can mean that you are often ignored or overlooked, even used as a figure of fun and therefore rejected from social groups. Heavy?

The old one was called "You VS Spock" in my head and was measuring how much I liked my boyfriend in relation to how much I liked Spock. It was a laugh really. Especially since I like Spock more than I like anyone else in the known universe. Oh, Spock.

I don't really know which one I prefer. I just figured that I'd put the new one as the main entry because for some reason that made sense when I decided to do it. I can't really justify it now, sadly. Hopefully, I might be able to find access to a scanner soon because so much colour information and detail is lost in photographs.

Day 39: Dreams.

Can you believe how long this took me? Because I can. I have the gift of faith, you see. I did about 4000 versions of this which is why the title has gradually changed over time, much like how the message of God gets distorted through time.

This isn't one of my best pieces but it isn't one of my worst either. I painted it really quickly because I wasn't feeling very patient and so it's an incy wincy bit messy. But on the other hand, wow, look - It's done.

This one is about dreams in a sense of surrealism and comfort. I've been having a lot of comforting dreams lately as opposed to the ones I get more often and so I thought I would do a piece that had a touch of surrealism in the colours and the presence of all the watching eyes, mixed with the idea of comfort, perfection and warmth that dreams can have.

Day 38: Abandoned.

I'm not sure I feel about this piece particularly... I don't think I connected very well with the theme. Usually I would have then chosen to do something based on a piece of literature but instead I just went ahead and did something quite clichéd. I guess I can't win them all. Besides, the colours are quite tasty.

Day 37: Eyes.

This is a fairly old idea which I decided to recreate and re-use. I did a unit on cityscapes for my GCSE exam so that was about four years ago, I suppose. In total, the piece was made up of three A1 pieces and the piece linked is just the middle section. The original idea was simply a visual mesh of elements of cities that interest me, primarily: surveillence, light, over-crowding, technology etc. There's another piece I've done that is also quite similar here, which I painted when I was in Brazil.