A Piece a Week 15 – The Purple Chair WIP

I’m sitting here with a splitting headache, one I’ve had for most of the night, but it has been a good night.

Tonight was my last art class for the term and now we have two weeks off before we delve into next term. This term was all about mixing colours and at first I was a little wary. My first time attending this group and a long history with other art training (mostly graphic design) to contend with, when we were asked to mix colours and paint little squares of the eighty or so colours derived from two primaries, I had to convince myself that this was a Mr Miyagi moment and I needed to wax on and wax off before I tried to whack anybody.

And I was right. The first two projects of the term were technical in nature, however the remaining three were inspiring and resulted in artwork being produced. Two of them you have seen here – Sponge Inspired and Gungurru were both class projects. The last project was to paint a chair (one or more).

Now on the surface this could sound quite boring. And yes, at first I found it challenging to come up with a concept that inspired me enough to put considerable effort into it. But when I did, I took it and ran with it.

It is still not finished, but since I have slaved my butt off over this for the last few days, I’m declaring it my Piece a Week this week – The Purple Chair.

Sorry about the horrible photo, but it is night here and the lighting in my studio just doesn’t cut it for photography. Approximately 56 x 70mm, it is quite large. It’s acrylic and I am very encouraged by my progress on it.

The perspective was/is a killer, though. I’m not a fan of linear perspective. I don’t generally paint things that require extensive perspective, but I was challenged to so I did. But as the chair doesn’t really exist and I had to construct it from light source logic and perspective principles, it reeeeeally put my brain to work into getting angles and foreshortening right. I spent ages, for example, getting those two arms to mirror each other. But most of the construction phase is complete and now I will be glazing and fixing and finalising the painting. Still a lot of work to do, but the most painful parts are over (hopefully).

I will finish it in the next couple of weeks and hopefully get a better photo up here.

Best wishes,
Liz Powley

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