Flamingos

All great artists get ideas, images, styles, and so much more from society, experiences around them, and from other artists to inspire new artwork . There are no original thoughts, but there are original actions that come from those thoughts. My five flamingo drawings are a collection of ideas from other works, styles, and inspiration I got from daily life in society. This was a college artwork I had done in my interdisciplinary drawing course. This course incorporated writing and drawing from new and different perspectives. This artwork series was about finding inspiration in sources to “steal” and utilize as my own. My sources are flamingo imagery I saw on a backpack, use of charcoal powder in the background that failed to bring about the water dropped background texture of Casey Bourgh’s. Instead it brought in the texture of blotting and smudging to get a cloud resembling essence. Third, the pastel palette from Willem de Kooning's Woman I painting that was used as a highlight. Fourth, the use of monochromatic color composition in each piece. I utilized ideas and styles that I have been wanting to experiment with, including cubism, realism, surrealism, realistic glass, and textured landscape.

I wanted to take risks, but I also wanted these pieces to be a series so I chose to utilize charcoal and pastel as my mediums for the five drawings. They are my favorite mediums because of the smooth or rough look I can give to them, having the ability to create tonality through the black, white, and pop of color, and a forgiving nature of these mediums. This series really emphasizes the process of artwork creation. As an artist you are bound to use ideas you have seen and make them your own in order to produce new and interesting artworks. This particular series stretched my creativity and produced fun experiments that are now my favorite styles and skills and are brought to many of my other works. If you are just starting out as an artist I would highly recommend this exercise of source “stealing” to see what new things you can come up with.