Final Projects

Well here they are… my final pieces of the semester. This first one is in the style of a “tromp l’oeil”- a “fool the eye” painting that tries to mimic reality as closely as possible. This is a view of Albert Einstein’s desk. Some of the objects include: a letter urging president Eisenhower to develop the atomic bomb, a NY Times from the day the atomic bomb dropped, a paper he wrote in response about his famous equation and its implications in the weapon, sheet music from Schubert (one of his favorites to play on the violin), his book on relativity translated into Hebrew, one of his notebooks, a pocket watch to symbolize his breakthroughs on space & time, his briar pipe which he chewed on deep in thought and a photo of him and his wife Elsa on a ship in Japan. Each one of these was thought out carefully placed in this arrangement, then meticulously painted at life size. (Its about 2′ x ‘) That is why this is the longest I have ever put into a painting… about 75 hours. But it might be my favorite thing ever, so it was worth it.

My second final project is a comparative painting of 2 sauropod dinosaurs: the Camarasaurus(smaller) and the Diplodocus(bigger). I put around 60 hours in this one, so not to far behind the einstein piece. I started with the skeletons, then drawings of the musculature, then I made clay models, color studies & texture studies. In the final painting I tried to render each and every scale on the dinosaurs… no small task. I should have picked smaller dinosaurs! But I am very happy with these 2 guys too.

It has been a long semester. All of the work has paid off though. Both of these pieces were selected to be in our class’s art show in May. Now, only one more project to go!