COLOR & COMPOSITION

I began my first sustained exploration of painting after an extensive foundation in drawing. Entering color for the first time felt like crossing a threshold: while my training in value, structure, and perspective provided a scaffold, I lacked an intuitive grasp of color theory and had to build it through deliberate practice. Parallel lessons in visual communication—figure/ground, echoing, compositional hierarchy—expanded my approach to organizing a pictorial field. For the final I turned to representational painting, discovering a joy in translating observation into pigment. That experience became a formative bridge toward the concerns and methods of my honors thesis. In my final I worked from a casual porch snapshot, I translated a figure into a compressed interior. Loose, layered strokes let forms resolve and fray; scumbled greens and umbers carry the body while small reds—ember, cup, hat—set the focal rhythm. Backlighting flattens depth into stacked planes; soft edges around the face fold the figure into the room. Smoke is treated as shape, not detail, to hold the gaze. I became interested in the tension between interpretive observation and painterly construction.