Before Hallowen there was..

30st October 2008: Today, I managed to finish one of my paintings for the painting class. It was the relationship painting based around the portrait painting I did as my last project. I did mention that briefly in my blog post here. That was a painting of Pranav standing in a towel, with socks and shoes on. Having a hard time imagining that? Go here. We were at Suju's farmhouse in alibag and all his clothes got wet at the beach. And they didn't dry till the time we were supposed to leave for pune again. So he had to ride in the car without a shirt or pants. We stopped at the nearest store and bought him a pair right there. It was hilarious.

Now, for the second part of the project, I had to take that person I had painted, and do a mind map of words that signify it. And using those words, I had to create a painting that would have some meaning to it.. How or what I feel when I think of him, should influence what the painting's like. Sounds like a really cool project huh? I think so too. I had originally thought this painting could be completely abstract. There's no objectiveness to what a color or shape means to someone. And even when talking about it to maggie, I said, this painting is going to be a bunch of angry black and red paint splatters or maybe depressing colors.

Mind map for painting
Originally uploaded by yashrg

But here, take a look at my word map. I did this in a couple of minutes, and looking at it, Ideas started flowing. I got so pumped up for this painting, I squeezed the paints out, turned on my laptop to look at reference images and got to work. I decided against doing something abstract and thought of meaningful imagery. After the big Landmark Logo and rubik's cube was done, I paused and realized I don't have anything else to put there. I can't remember how long my first stretch was, but I took several breaks in between and was working till the night. Slowly building up and putting in a photo frame with the remains of a torn picture, a phone with his number on it, a dart board.. But really, the juice had run out.

I was hoping to go to the Halloween pub night at the college. Sachin had expressed interest at first. So I called Rajat up to know what the latest plan was. And as I had imagined, it was off. Oh well, there's always the party Nicole's throwing at the apartment. And I also had to finish the outdoor painting by looking at the reference image from that day. But I was too tired at the end of the first painting to work on that. I would just have to hand in my incomplete outdoor painting.