Process Inspired by the Secret Geometry of Theodore Gericault's Raft of the Medusa

 

This painting, "Rescue Squad" 2010 done by Robin F Willaims, is the original inspiration for this next series of work. Williams used the master work "Raft of the Medusa" by Theodore Gericault as her reference for the composition and subject matter. Thus, I went straight to the source and did a geometric compositional study of Raft of the Medusa. I've decided to show both because I'm also going to be using the complementary color scheme of Williams' Rescue Squad in this series.

 Painting on nine 8"x10" wood panels at once allows me to brake the over all composition into smaller segments. I wanted to see how strong these compositional elements remained, even after being dissected. Also, through being inspired to make a narrative about the service industry, without illustrating it too literally, I had the idea to paint with a broom with the substrates on the floor. I have done this in the past but was truly inspired to revisit this process after mopping the floor at work.

 Despite being prepared to cover these panels in multiple layers of paint I stopped myself at this early stage. Certain suggestions from the previous critique led me to keep the color scheme more direct and minimalistic (I totally almost went for the red, yellow, blue again by accident). Also, I grew weary of over working these panels. I saw something beautiful about the simple blue gestural marks so i decided to keep them as is. This is also a stepping stone toward a drawing series, were I plan to maintain the color scheme from Williams' painting in the process to come. By using white charcoal and colored pencil I want to explore working figures and portraits into these compositions.

 Seeing as how the previous work resolved so quickly I still had to do something with all of this paint that I had prepped. So I set out to repeat this process on a collection of six 11"x14" canvases. Still using Williams' color scheme, I intentionally overworked the composition in order to build more texture and make the colors more muted. This lead to some of those important compositional elements from Raft of the Medusa to fade away, so I mixed white paint with clear granular gel and applied it with palette knife in order to carve out those original compositional elements. I'm still unsure if some or all of these will be left as is. I would like to incorporate a representational element to each one but I do not want to simply juxtapose a figure or portrait like I have done in the past. Instead I think it would be stronger conceptually and compositionally to render ambiguos faces or figures that match the same expressionistic mark making.