A new semester, a new course, this time I am taking "Five Themes for a painting Project" with Patricia Claro (http://patriciaclaro.blogspot.com/).

The course, in short is as follows: you have to choose a piece of art and copy it in black (optical) and white. After you have to cite this piece of art in a piece of your own with a restricted palette (Primary Red, Lemon Yellow and Cerulean Blue) to finish later with a triptic or diptic of your own. Sounds challenging isn't it?

I began with a copy of Vermeer's "The Girl with a Pearl Earring" I am quite proud of the result, and my teacher also liked it very much, that means a lot for me since she is a great, and well known artist.

After the nude from my previous post I did an incursion on abstract, painting the following with acrylics. The design was based on a collage I made with several cut outs from magazines.

I have some fun, but I am not really convinced of the result, some people like the painting but I am not convinced of the artistic quality of such a painting. I consider this somehow "decorative" instead of a piece of art.
Following my incursion in the realm of abstraction I continued using acrylics (the preferred media of my teacher, Ricardo Fuentealba-Fabio). This time I painted something related perhaps to Pop Art. The subject is a US Army Mug from the Research and Development Command (my favorite mug) and an arab shemagh I bought in Iraq, the local touch is a the strand and label of tea bag of a popular Chilean local brand which comes from the lid. I painted the background with a sponge roll as I saw on John Myatt's series on TV: the one were they were painting on the style of David Hockney.

In the following painting, still using acrylics, the theme was conflict. I got my material from the Internet, the composition was done based on a couple of photos of some palestinian kids playing soccer and a Israeli chick which was walking on the street carrying a gun. I mix the subjects and I got the following painting. The girl now is watching them on the desert. I think the idea was not bad, but I could not get the result I wanted. The painting has a quite "Comic Style" that I did not wanted this time. Anyway, a the end I participated with these three painting in the exhibition organised at the end of the course.

Many people liked them, so I guess I should be satisfied, but I think I have still a lot to practice and learn.