For longer now I did not write into the @alienarthive community, but the reason is not that I was inactive, no quite the contrary, I painted so much I did not managed to write :-DDD But here I am with ten new artworks. Portraits of the famous painter Basquiat in shrill colours spiced with a bit of social criticism. The paintings are open for sale from 1.7. – 31.7.22 on opensea curated by the Munich gallery Artespace. (Follow the link to see/buy all artworks and make me rich happy)
My message
Young famous, young dead. An icon but for whom? Profit for some, happiness for less and soon all traces of the “real” personality are erased, transformed, modified into something tragic but sellable.
This Basquy NFT project plays with contradictions, bright and cheery colours clash with black and white portraits of the famous “non-graffiti” painter Basquiat. Hidden in the background is the fight for social justice: people dying in the sea, bombs, weapons and destruction, moneymaking for the sake of having more. Symbols of Basquiat‘s crazy short life are woven into the narrative, his love of music, his instable living situations, his drive to createcreatecreate and to succeed in the art world and finally his occupation with death.
What I did – the technical part
All ten paintings are made digitally with procreate on an Ipadpro, but although the artworks are made digitally the process resembles very much how a traditional painting is made.
I started with a base layer which in this case has a light brown wooden texture. This layer is in „multiply“ mode. Next comes the base coat which lends the painting the rough oil paint texture (overlay mode). These layers are the same for all ten paintings of this series. The next layer is a colored layer, a kind of base coat. I used the texture of this layer also for all ten paintings, but the colouration differs vastly.
The next step was to sketch the portrait. This I did in two parts, first with a pencil than with a thin black marker.
Next was the black and white oil paint layer of face and hair. After finishing I always sat back for a short time to think through how I will transform-distort the portrait. As you can see on the paintings, I changed this step a lot. On some paintings I multiplied the oil paint of the face, slide and overlayed it.
On others I painted more eyes, noses, or other parts of the face. In some artworks I mixed both methods (the sliding and adding new painted facial features). I redrew and multiplied the sketch which shines through the oil paint layer of the face or I multiplied parts of the shades.
My goal was to arouse an uncertainty, perhaps a bit of nausea in the observer. I wanted to distance the portraits from Basquiat’s inherent beauty (I think most people would judge him beautiful) and to state clearly that we all construct a persona, a Basquiat of our own making. I also wanted to allude to the contradiction of art being singular or reproducibly, a topic which gets a new layer because this series is made and published digitally.
Next on was the oil base for the garments which was also the moment to decide on the general color combination for the respective painting. Oh – I did not mentioned this in the beginning – but I made one color palette in grey hues for the face and hair and one in bright and saturated colors for garment and background. I completely sticked to this color choices which in my view pulls all paintings of this series closer together (artistically).
For the background I used several layers: one for the color fields and several to add symbols and more „story“.
The last layer for every work was the writing. The last - but for me the most important step - because the writing adds context/ a message, so that one does not forget how young and tragic Basquiat's life was, which is easily overlocked because of his vibrant paintings and immensely fame.
I am curious what you think of this series and how you tackle the technical aspect of painting a whole series (meaning how you work with layers, color palettes, base coats etc.)? And honestly lso not an unimportant part: how do you market your artowrks. It's my first time I sell anything on opensea 😱😱😱
Read more about my art und upcoming exhibitions on neumannsalva or buy some of my digital artworks on NFT showroom or Opensea.io
Last but not least: if my post coaxed a smile on your face you could support me with cocain coffee on Ko-fi
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These are awesome congrats!
Thank you... but I am highly suspicious if I will sell anything 😱, as the gallery is not marketing/advertising a lot (more or less nothing). But I was intrigued by this concept of choosing one person/topic and several artist working on this with their personal style. It seems this was done by other galleries already (i did not knew)...
By the way i did not forget the scholarship idea, I am still thinking about this, but its hard to find a solution.