critique notes

Critique of self-portraits

This series of portraits depicts a stylized face looking downward toward the ground. The woman’s face holds a stoic and contemplative emotion, while the woman’s hair, loose and stylized, contains the eyes movement around the piece, creating energy toward the overall composition. The colors that the artist chose led me to believe that their intention was to depict the opposing words, intensity, and dullness.

I chose a dullness theme for the first piece in their series; the color scheme was focused around colors with higher tints, and no shades. This created a low contrast focused around pastel blues, reds, and yellows. I chose intensity for the second piece, because the second piece contains much more saturated colors, while also leaving tinted colors in the composition. This decision caused an increase in the contrast of the composition, and led me to believe that their motive for this choice was to depict a more intense variation of the image used. The artist also added green to their saturated piece, which in the overall series creates contrast, and increase the intensity of the painting.

The artist true intention was to show her variation of the words reserved, and extravert. The artists pastel focused piece was meant to represent a quieter side to the artist. While the more intense piece was meant to represent a more out going and excited form of the artist personality.