Artist's Statement:

For this piece, I wanted to try and convey Spring. During spring, flowers start blooming and sprouts start peeking out. Everything seems so much brighter all of a sudden. So for this piece, I used bright colors. Compared to my other pieces, this is very colorful. Spring is about new growth and rain so in my painting, there’s flowers, green strokes that remind me of freshly mowed grass, and dots that represent rain. I also tried to play with clear & blurry, soft & sharp, and detailed & unfocused. Basically a lot of contrast. So in the piece, the face is detailed and clear but the body and flowers are suggestive and not detailed. Also, the hair is soft and blends into the background, which contrasts with the sharp and clear green strokes. The oil paint automatically dries matte so I added dots that dried glossy or wet-looking to represent spring rains. As the lighting changes or as you move around the painting, the “raindrops” glisten. For more clear representation of rain than the pink and gold dots, I added dots of hot glue since it’s clear and creates raised circles that look more like drops of water. The hot glue was hard to use and leaves behind strings of glue that remind me of spider webs. The hot glue rain drops can’t be seen from far away so it doesn’t distract from the piece. They are gifts for the viewers that come close to the painting. All the parts of the painting that represent spring are mostly located on the bottom but disperse upwards. This represents the happiness that arrives with the arrival of spring. Everything feels lighter and is uplifting. When painting this piece, I had a lot of trouble with the skin and the colors. I painted section by section because the painting was bigger and I didn’t have much time to spend each painting session. This resulted in the skin being splotchy because the paint would dry and I would have to try to mix the same colors. I made the face and the body slightly different colors to make the piece more up to interpretation. I want viewers to think. The face and the body are slightly different colors so is she wearing clothes? But there’s no neckline or wrinkles to indicate that she’s clothed. Then are the flowers part of her clothing or flowering in front? There’s so many questions that can be asked to make the piece special for the audience. Overall, I want this piece to be a piece that draws people in and then rewards them with small details that make the piece special for the viewers.