Week 5 Inspiration & Research

I showed this artist last week, but it really came into play with this week's work.  This particular image is the main inspiration for my way of approaching portraits on patterned backgrounds.

Like I said in my work statement, I think one of the things that got me thinking about the relationship and interaction between textiles and people, both from a design standpoint and a consumer standpoint, is actually seeing the process in action from a (sort of) behind the scenes perspective.

This is a screenshot I pulled from the Lily Pulitzer catalogue.  The print is called 'Bungle in the Jungle,' and it was designed by someone I was acquainted with in high school who went on to study textiles at SCAD.  She recently graduated and it seemed like only a few months later, she had a print go into production.  I'm a little jealous and even though I didn't know her that well, really proud of her and also just blown away by how awesome this is.  I think I was also just a little bit surprised by the print itself because although I suppose it's somewhat in line with the design sensibilities of previous work I've seen from her, it's also totally different than most things she's done.  It was really interesting for me to take a close look at this print already knowing a little bit about the person who designed it. (I also want this dress, but it's like $200...)

I'm not sure where this artist, Louise Crowell, is based, because apparently she was born in Tennessee, but she did this painting which I feel explemplifies Vancouver perfectly.  I was looking for images of rainy Vancouver as colour references and inspiration for the window scene in the painting, but most of them were photos taken in winter in the downtown areas, when all the deciduous trees are bare and the only surroundings are all concrete buildings, and I didn't feel that that really portrayed the personality of the city.  This painting however, shows the upside to living in a place where it rains all the time: everything is always green.  Whether or not it's a real place, I felt it was appropriate to the mood I was going for, and explains my almost compulsion to include green in that outside scene, which at the time seemed to me like a really bold choice.

In my painting, the place outside the window isn't necessarily Vancouver specifically (I think I decided a while ago that it was actually Scotland, but Vancouver's honestly probably the closest thing weather wise to Scotland anyway, and it's something I can relate to better), but it was important to me to have that same kind of cozy, and to me, homey mood.  This is probably because, although my figure is anonymous (partially done intentionally so that she doesn't seem like she's supposed to be me, partially for other reasons explained in this week's work post), she's meant to almost embody this patterned textile that for me is very, very personal, and therefore it makes sense to me that other elements of the painting, for example, the background, should say something else about me or be as familiar to me as that textile.