Master Painting Assignment

For my master painting assignment I chose Roy Lichtenstein's "Girl in Mirror".

I chose Lichtenstein because I really enjoy his aesthetic (as a hugh comic book fan, I love both his original paintings and his recreations). I also like that he would sometimes use his art to mock advertising and marketing, and the way they depicted women as unrealistic caricatures.

For my recreation, I used a Barbie doll set in front of a red background holding a toy mirror. The final image actually consists of three images: one with the doll's hair in focus in the foreground, one with the doll's hand/mirror in focus, and one of the doll's face which was used to simulate her reflection in the mirror. I chose to use a doll as opposed to a real person because I felt like it better represented the feeling of the original painting, which was not meant to represent a "real" woman, rather, a cartoonish and stereotypical interpretation of a beautiful, carefree woman.

During the printing process, I boosted the saturation of the colors in Lightroom in an attempt to make the image look even more cartoonish.

For my personal interpretation of the piece I created two images, each addressing a different artistic element of Lichtenstein's work. The first addressed the artist's feeling on marketing and the depiction of women in advertising. The photograph consists of two images: one of the model (myself) with no makeup or use of products of any kind, the second image was me again, but made up and heavily photoshopped to emulate the look of models in beauty advertisements.

The second image I created focused on Lichtenstein's own recreation of comic book panels. For this image, I chose a panel from the graphic novel "Asterios Polyp" because of it's bold but basic color scheme (all of the artwork in the book consists of four colors: magenta, blue, yellow and purple). I also selected this panel because it contains an obscured vision of the subject, and an inset of her face (much like Lichtenstein's "Girl in Mirror"). 

For this photograph, I placed my model on a white background and lit her with two strong side lights (in an attempt to cancel shadows and make her look two dimensional like the original artwork). Then, in photoshop, I used a layer mask to create an inset image of her face in close up (lit the same as the full body shot), converted the image to black and white, then used two masks of color overlay with the opacity turned down to create the color scheme of the original.

Were I to choose between the two interpretive images, I would pick the first because it works as a stand alone image without having to see the original. Without seeing the panel from "Asterios Polyp" the second image is not as strong.