Marguerite McQuarrie Whitley and Professor Bruce Hixon Smith, Visual Arts

The outcome of my final show was different than what I had originally proposed when I applied for an ORCA grant. I began as I had planned, studying the figure in sessions at the Springville art museum, and I had started and nearly completed 15 smaller paintings with the largest dimension being 15 inches. In these paintings I used images from magazines and sketches in a collage approach. With these paintings I made the mistake of wanting to include everything: environment, objects, and people. Upon showing these images to a couple of professors working with me on my final show to receive their advise on how to continue with my final show, they advised me to focus on what was most successful in these small studies-the objects instead of the entire collage. I began focusing on single objects in oil paintings with dimensions of 43″ x 48″. Originally, I planned to do four paintings, but, following the suggestion of one of my professors, I ended up doing six paintings.

In these six paintings for my BFA final project, I attempted to show how chairs and shirts, two very common objects, can take on a life of their own. Even though chairs are created to reflect the people who use them-you look in someone’s house and what they’ve chosen for furniture reflects who they are, their economic and social circumstances-a chair’s ergonomic shape, designed to fit humans, ends up giving chairs human qualities all their own. Think of how we give chairs human characteristics by calling their parts “legs,” “arms,” “back,” “seat.” It was this human quality that drew me to chairs.

I chose to paint dated chairs, preferring objects that aren’t considered beautiful in their own right to see if I can elevate them through art. The chairs were faded, stained, made of vinyl, or just so extremely ordinary. Painting these chairs allowed me to call attention both to what we surround ourselves with (since chairs are common, everyday objects) and to what we cast away (these unfashionable chairs are from DI or are just stragglers left in the painting studio).

I added shirts into the equation because while a chair is stiff and structured, a shirt is organic, containing an infinite variety of folds. A shirt molds to whoever wears it; it doesn’t stand on its own in the way a chair does. The shirts also allowed me to mix in other colors and combinations to convey complementary, analogous and monochromatic color relationships. Painting chairs and shirts together allowed me to draw from them the variety of colors and shapes that they contain, exaggerating or nuancing them for artistic purposes.

I also thought about and tried adding fruit to the paintings. I did this with the intention of adding something organic and not man-made. However, the fruit cramped the area around the chairs and did not work spatially so I painted them out. It was actually the process of sanding out and painting over the fruit that helped me realize that I needed to make the paint more interesting. I found myself painting and sanding out areas only to repaint and start again, trying not to confine myself, like I was before, to the strict structure of the chair. I wanted some edges to become less defined and brush strokes to become more animated. Even though I began to learn more about paint quality and variety through this project, I would need to start another project to explore these issues even further.

Even though I strayed from the goal of my original ORCA proposal in painting objects rather than human figures, I still consider the figure important and want to make it a focus of my art. One thing that I learned from focusing on objects that were right in front of me was that my strengths lie in painting from models. I would like to make that the focus with my next attempts with the figure, since in beginning of my BFA project a mistake I made was painting the figure from photographs instead of models.