success!

my last assignment in painting class was to choose one or two expressionist painters, and "borrow" elements from their style and apply it to our painting of two nudes. i chose the artist alice neel.


on thursday, we had the critique. we each had to get up in front of the class and explain which painter's style we copied, and what elements we took and used in our paintings. then the class made comments. then we clapped at the end of each critique, which is a nice and maybe slightly silly touch. i was the second to last person to go, and right after i hung mine up, rick, the teacher, had this ear-to-ear grin on his face and said, "for this one, let's just clap before the critique as well," hahaha!!! so the whole class clapped before my critiqe even began! and it was just kind of this high moment. and it was weird, because it all happened so fast and in a blur, but while they were clapping, i was getting the alice neel pictures i used as a reference, at that moment i banged my finger pretty bad, and it's all black and blue under the nail bed. it was such a weird moment, like it was grounding or something. like wabi-sabi. like, this moment would've been too perfect if i didn't bang my finger right then. but i couldn't deal with it right then, so i just sucked it up as part of the experience. and the critique was such an amazing success, i was so surprised. basically only one guy had a critique (the navels were too dark), but nobody agreed with him. HAHA. the teacher even liked the signature i added. he had this ecstatic smile on his face the whole time while looking at it, and he commented that he liked how my "naive" signature is so proudly displayed on the bottom, HAHA.