ALTERED MASTERPIECE:
This week's assignment is to make a pastel drawing that uses color to change the meaning or psychological mood of a famous painting. Begin by selecting a well-known painting that holds some personal interest for you. Be sure to make a nice digital print of your selected piece (preferably from a high-quality reproduction) so that you're not working from a computer screen.
Next, study the image for a while and imagine how your "read" of the painting might differ if the color were different. For example, if your selected piece is Van Gogh's Starry Night, imagine how you might feel about the piece if the sky were bright orange instead of blue, if the stars were blue instead of yellow, if the trees in the foreground were red and green, etc.
Using your chalk pastels and whatever kind of mark-making approach (including, if you're feeling ambitious, Seurat's "Pointillism"), make a drawing that re-interprets the painting by changing its color scheme significantly. You may want to consider "inverting" the colors -- i.e., changing each color into its complement. Or, if you prefer, alter the palette to emphasize a dominant hue not seen in the original. However you choose to approach the assignment, concentrate on "re-creating" the painting in such a way that you give it a new dimension of meaning that feels uniquely your own.
You may use however many or few colors you want to for this assignment, but complex (i.e., blended) colors tend to be more successful than simple ones.
Be sure to bring your print of the original painting to class so we can look at it during our critique.
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