salon des refusés

My painting, Shelly, from my last blog posting, will be a part of the Salon des Refusés 2011 show at Gallery M Squared on W. 19th Street in the Heights. The show opening will be Friday, July 1st from 6:30-9pm and the show will run until Saturday, July 9th. Here is the link to the gallery's website with more details about the show:
http://www.gallerymsquared.com/calendar.php.

In order to qualify for this show, my artwork had to be rejected from Lawndale Art Center's The Big Show. Salon des Refusés 2011 is patterned off an exhibition in Paris in 1863 where famous artists (among them Cézanne, Manet, Pissarro and Whistler) who were rejected from a similarly well known type of show, were offered a place to exhibit their work by Napoleon III who insisted that it should be the public who was the judge of the art. It is in that spirit that I invite you all to be my judges...

reconsidering gender

Finally! The latest painting in my series on transgendered individuals. As alluded to in my last post, I'm using a technique that employs layers of color and features blotted lines in this 24" x 30" acrylic on canvas painting. It is titled Shelly.

This series focuses on a theme that is new for me: Reconsidering Gender. The inspiration for this series is the idea that, while sex is a biological reality that greets each of us at birth, gender is a sophisticated construct that is instilled in us by our cultural upbringing based solely on our biological sex. My paintings depict people who are challenging traditional norms of gender.

The other three paintings in this series are more suited for a mature audience. If anyone wishes to view them, please email me at ana.c.champion@gmail.com and I'll send you these images.

the victorian lady

This painting represents a new direction in my work. I was inspired by photographic images and decided to play off the images by incorporating my knowledge of color combinations into these paintings using the blotted line technique (see a few blog posts below). The finished piece is 36"x48" and is painted in acrylic entitled The Victorian Lady. First I took the original image from a magazine photograph and transferred it onto tracing paper. I then used ink to make the line drawing on a small scale and projected it on an opaque projector to a large scale. The background was painted very flat and smooth while looking at the original image. (That is why the two images do not line up perfectly.) I chose colors of the Victorian era to compliment the feeling of the image. Next I will take the concept one step further and make a series of paintings based around a theme.