Critiqued Assignment #3: Not Flat / "Carb Or Hydrate"

Abstract

This is a digital photograph of McKenzie Drake's mixed media artwork. It was submitted as the third critiqued assignment, "Not Flat," on April 4, 2017, in Erin Harmon's Intermediate/Advanced Painting class. The student's artist statement for this work reads: "This painting is a collaged illustration of an arm, waffles, and a water bottle strewn about with an freeing energy, yet combined through a sticker-like quality that helps to break the flatness of the wood. Use of outline and transparency between foreground and background help to confuse space, while cutouts help to translate an overall spatial ambiguity of atmosphere and tension among colors. Stuck together, this piece was a challenging exercise of both form and function, opening new ideas to how my paintings can tell their unusual stories on a variety of surfaces."