Wow, welcome to my end-of-term 2/Mid-year art report blog thing. Shockingly, I have not decided to drop out yet. At the moment, I haven't got a single board completed and I have one finished painting so, at this point, it's in G-d's hands-on whether we get the ball rolling at some point.
Take it back now y'all
Right so, updates on the paintings I talked about in my last blog post. My beth el synagogue painting has made little progress (shocking, I know). This is what it looks like now:
Now for my boy Bendix Hallenstein. He is done! He is the only completed painting and for that, I think he should feel honored. This is what he looks like:
Sexy
As you can see, I've painted over his eyes and written some stuff next to him. The writing is a quote from Walter Nash the Labor Prime Minister between 1957 and 1960. The quote says "There is a major struggle adapting these people in our cultural life." which is a statement Nash made about Jewish people and why they shouldn't be accepted as immigrants into New Zealand which isn't surprising at all cause literally everyone hated Jews during this time and New Zealand was known to have turned away thousands of Jewish immigrants seeking refuge from the Holocaust as well as being one of the only countries that didn't prosecute Nazis who moved here post-WWII even though there was evidence of Nazis in the country. Now isn't that a fun fact! Below you can see the painting I finished and some planning I put into it.
As you can see, his eyes were a bit off but it was fine cause I was planning on painting over them anyway.
Right, so for my painting of the wailing wall this is how it's going:
As you can see, not too much progress there either. I do plan on drawing the destruction of the holy temple for the start of my first board but I have no clue how I'm actually gonna do that.
Also, I titled this section as history paintings so here's one that can be added to that group. I decided to take up the middle section of board 1, I'm gonna paint the red sea splitting and then also include people immigrating. I think this is where the Tame Iti influence is gonna come in. Below you can see some of my planning as well as some google keep planning.
Board lay out a sketch
A colored sketch thing and then the start of my actual painting.
At this point, I was thinking "Uh-oh Spaghetti-Os" because those mountains do not look like mountains! Mum finds the fact that I can paint people but can't paint mountains very funny. Anyway, I probably going to re-plan the mountains so that there are fewer mountains.
Another Man!
It's another painting of a man! This time, it's a Kurdish man during the mass immigration of Jewish people from the surrounding Arab countries to Israel.
At the moment I think it's looking good. My one concern is the child's face which, as you can see, I started painting the face, hated it, then painted over it, and now it looks like a demon child. And then there's also the child on the left who I don't know whether I'll include or not cause I might do some more writing and stuff but I might not do that on this painting. I don't know yet. Also, I'm slightly concerned about the jacket being too dark and blending in too much with the shirt so I might lighten it slightly.
Ok, so I had the brilliant idea of filming myself talking about my board instead of, like, spending an hour writing about it. So, here's a 30-minute video of me talking about my board. You should also note that I had just come out of the shower and filmed this, like straight away so it's a bit messy and I go on a tangent about the holocaust, the Tony awards, and probably a bunch of other things. Also, I didn't realize how weird I look in this jumper while laying on the floor. This is what I look like in the video:
Anyway, I don't remember half the things I said in this video, I kinda just blacked out while doing it, so there might be some unfinished thoughts and ideas that I talk about. Also, another really funny thing is that I didn't want my face to be the thumbnail so I used word art to make, like, a cover and it was gonna have like a title and then like a subheading. I don't know why, but when I uploaded it, you couldn't see the heading so now it just says "I am ready to drop out".
Right, so, my thoughts on my progress so far; Uh, not good. I don't think I am going to finish this in time, solely based on the fact that I don't know what I am doing for the other boards and also the fact for the past three to four weeks I have not had the motivation for school. However, hopefully, something happens and I get some ideas or something. I don't remember if I said this or not, but Mrs. Clemence said she thinks I'm on track to finish and at least I've produced more work at this point than I have done in previous years, which isn't saying much as the bar is pretty low in terms of my work output.
