Existential Brain Funk

These are the two pieces from last year that really worked for me.





The top is a small painting from Advanced Figure Drawing, and the bottom is an illustration for the HP Lovecraft story 'The Tomb'. Both are examples of what I need to go back to and build on, because I've strayed too far from what both of those pieces were built upon.

Cityscapes: part one

My Senior illustration project for this semester is to design imagined cityscapes, and so far it's progressed decently but not quite as smoothly as I had planned. I had a few grand ideas of what each city should be like and where they should be taken that just haven't panned out, and I'm left with the feeling that what I have is flat and undetailed. Part of the problem is my painting style, which has gotten more loose and sketchy since last year, which is fine at times, but this project is requiring more detail than my brain wants to include.

The main hurdle, however, is time: the rigors of senior life are starting to manifest, and at the moment I have more to do than I care to think about. It's a good test for life in the real world, and so far I feel I've stepped up to the challenge, but it's certainly taking it's toll on my ambitions and goals for my artwork. Ultimately, I am pleased with what I've created, and all three of these pieces are going to be reworked a bit (especially the abandoned city, which I'm the most unhappy with execution-wise) but they're a decent start and they've only been getting better.



The "Islamic Art Deco" cityscape was my first piece, and it's concept is the weakest. I wanted to explore the connection between Art Deco and islamic art, because the former was certainly influenced by the latter, and because the growing wealth in arab countries has produced a decadence not unlike the American 1920s; however, the amount of research I was putting into it became a bit too time consuming, with too much reading and not enough painting, and without the proper detail and knowlege the paintings failed to convey "Islamic Art Deco" and ended up looking like neither. So while I'm relatively happy with the painting itself, I'm very discontent with the execution and concept.



After this I moved on to my second concept, that of a city completely and abruptly abandoned by its populous. This project was inspired by a number of photographic series I had come across, such as a series documenting the abandoned Ukranian city of Prypiat within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and a series on the abandoned Japanese mining island Gunkajima. This piece is the most complete of the series, but it is the one I'm least happy with, as I have so far failed to get the right amount of light and detail that I had imagined in my head. It remains an incomplete world, but hopefully adjustments in the coming weeks and the addition of my other two paintings to the series (which are coming out excellent so far) will round it out much more effectively.



My most recent series is my most fully realized so far, as well as the most successful to date in my opinion. This particular piece was the most unfinished of the three posted here (though it's a bit farther along now) but it has a sense of light and completeness that was more elusive with the other ones. This series is a geothermal city located in a dormant volcanic crater, where it's powered by the energy being drawn from the ground by a massive tower in the center. The buildings in this piece are dwellings located on the crater's rim, and are fed energy through a system of pipes and aquaducts connected to the main tower.

Hopefully each of these pieces will be fleshed out by the addition of new works.

first post

Turtle Shell
Originally uploaded by jsidlowski2

So I created this blog to showcase the increasing trickle of work that I'm producing this semester, now that skool is just about over. My cityscape project has taken a backseat this weekend while I try to finish up my natural science illustration pieces for the show after Thanksgiving break, which doesn't make me terribly happy, but so it goes. Hopefully getting to see No Country For Old Men tomorrow will give my mind a bit of a break.

Until I can get some proper work uploaded, here's one of the older illustration pieces that will hopefully be in the show.