Name of Piece: -Rusted-
Title: Rust
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Title: Rust
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For this project, I was inspired by Joseph Mallord William Turner a romantic landscape painter who lived from 1745 50 1839. Specifically, his painting Rain, Steam, and Speed shows the Maidenhead Railway Bridge which was completed in 1838. During the time of this painting, the industrial revolution in Britain was nearing its end. One symbol associated with the industrial revolution was the coal-fired steam engine train. In this painting, Tuner depicts a train barrelling toward the audience and it is believed that this painting is about the uncertain future that awaited with the invention of revolutionary technology such as the speed engine. One of the signs that point to this is the hazy fog that fills in most of the space in this image. There is one other theme that is believed to be included in this painting that being technology vs nature with most of the evidence to this being the small hare that appears on the train track running. This has been interpreted by people to indicate how technology was beginning to catch up with nature in terms of speed.
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Romanticism itself was an artistic and literary movement that started in the 18th to 19th centuries that spread through western Europe and to the rest of the world. In art, Romanticism had no precise style or method of painting but the common ideas among painters in this movement were focused on depicting emotions and senses, our connection to nature, individuality, and change. This was a break from the previous movement of Neoclassicism which was more focused on logic and science and drew on classical art. This is part of what attracted me to this artistic movement for this project.
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I knew that I wanted to make a piece based on Turner's work and that I wanted the message of the piece to be almost the opposite of Tuner's idea. While during Turner's time the steam engine was a fast evolution piece of technology that was becoming one of the fastest modes of transportation in today's world the steam engine train has been mostly left behind in favor of other technology such as planes and cars. This was the student idea I wanted to convey and I think that this image of this older used down bridge gives out this idea. To start the planning for this project I took pictures of different bridges and train tracks I found nearby and at parks for reference.
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I later chose this image as the landscape I wanted to recreate in pastel mostly because compared to the other landscapes it was more vibrant and warm with the sunlight hitting the leaves. I also was the one that connected the most with my idea of the bridge being old, rusted, and graffiti giving off this idea of an abandoned train track.
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For my first page of planning I did some of the background of J.M.W Turner and I essentially gather my thoughts on some of the landscapes he made. What stood out to me the most is that a lot of Turner work contain vibrates color with him even being referred as "The artist of Light". This is true of one of the pictures I have on the page of his painting Fort Vieaux which makes Rain Steam and Speed interesting as its not very statured but does contain this faint glow yellow throughout. For my second page I decided to sketch out some of the images I took and my thoughts about them. Most of the reasons why I did not choose the other images such as the bridge was due to the colors in that image being very dull. I also did not really like the perspective of facing the bridge straights on and centered.
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To start my project I started by drawing a grid on the Canson paper to transfer the image of the bridge accurately. I left space around the grid in order to experiment with the pastels on the paper before placing them on the board. I learned that this is especially helpful due to many of the browns in my pastel box looking similar in shade until you place them on the paper though this can apply to many colors. The other reason I left extra space is that the Canson sheet was to add a foam border, later on, when I hang it up I am going to need that extra space. A quick sketch was added using the grid method to indicate the placement of the bridge, river, and land.
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Working on the colors I started blocking off the darks and light in the image. At this point, I was adding the pastel in a vertical fashion mostly because I was planning to smooth it out later but also, I noticed in Turner's own work Rain Speed and Steam that the haze in colors most of the painting seems to be made vertical motions though they seem to be more circular strokes for the clouds I did want to incorporate some of the motion into my own work.
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To continue I add some darker colors adding some blues to the dark shadow and incorporating more light browns from the river and some of the whites from the ice. At this point, I started blending some parts of the sky with my finger mostly because the sky in the original photo was very clear and nontextured with a slight gradient to a greyish blue, light blue, and off-white. I still added the layer with horizontal lines but while doing this I realized that you could faintly see the grid line underneath even with a few layers of light blue and some grey-blue soft past already on. In order to avoid this applied the pastel thick for the sky as well as erase the gride in areas where there still wasn’t pastel.
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I was planning on doing more layers on top. I did blend some of the shadows and lights to get better coverage. I was careful not to smudge the colors together. At his point, I was trying to fill in more of the details in the background and foreground. I added the plants in the very foreground using quick lines which resembled the original plant. I also mostly used brown and yellow for the plants.
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To finish off the paste work I added more layers to the sky using a soft white pastel which I drew in a circular motion to make them look wispy. Same with the trees in backgrounds where I carefully blended the colors which do give the impression they're far away. I did add a few thin branches to represent the larger trees found in the background of the original. I finished adding the smaller details with hard pastels such as the highlight of the water and the bridge. The last thing I added was the branches near the far right and left of the piece.
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For the experimentation in this project before I started working on the project, I did some tests with the colors to see how they looked on the green background. Though another place where I experimented was with the tree you can see in the background past the bridge as well as the trees on the right of the image. My plan originally was to keep the vertical textured lines of yellow and brown, but when I looked over at the original image and Turner's work I realized that blending the colors would make them look far away in the distance. Also, it would help contrast the more detailed branches that were closer to the foreground.
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