One of my favorite portraits I’ve taken ever. This photo is of my best friend of 13 years, and I think it captures her personality very well. This was taken with a film camera and I developed it in my intro to photography class. Kim is contemplating her life while sitting on the steps of our high school football stadium. I wish that I had taken photography earlier in high school, because I had a lot of fun with this class. I don’t remember how to take photos like this anymore unfortunately, I would need a refresher course. There is something very neat about taking a picture, and developing the image on photo paper from the negative. But this is one of the best photos I took in that intro class, and I still love this picture almost 4 years later. 
This photograph I took in a restaurant with my Nikon camera, I loved the lighting from the candle and the wooden table. My friend gave me a miniature cannon as a birthday present, and I thought it would be a unique subject matter to photograph. I really like the way this picture came out. I guess I am going through a miniature art phase. I just thought the lighting and the cannon was a unique photograph, I’m glad that I bring my Nikon around with me often so I can take advantage of interesting lighting and my surroundings!
Throwback Thursday: Show at the Contemporary Art Center
Freshman year at DAAP, our studio was fortunate enough to showcase some work at Cincinnati’s own Contemporary Art Center! In 2012, the CAC had a show entitled “Spectacle” which featured work based on music media. This exhibit explored music videos as an important and influential art form in contemporary art. Our assignment was a response to this exhibit. We chose a piece in the Spectacle show, and made a response piece. I do not remember the name of the artist or the title of the piece I responded to, but it was a piece based on a music video made entirely out of yarn. Steriogram’s “Walkie Talkie Man,” directed by Michel Gondry, is the music video of the piece that my piece was based off of. When seeing this piece, I thought it would be very interesting to make a piece made completely from yarn.
My Mom, our friend Laura, and I went together to check out the show and decide which piece I should respond to. Very fun girls night!
Here is a link to the music video “Walkie Talkie Man” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7UvbwCjXUk
The original installation at the CAC I based my piece off of. I wish I could find the artist’s name and title of the work! I incorporated the color and piles of yarn into my own, but smaller quantities.
This piece was the first “all-nighter” I ever pulled in college! Since the original piece involved music and yarn, I made a guitar out of yarn. Cutting out cardboard in the shape of a guitar, I hot glued yarn around the entire thing, using black yarn for the base and red yarn for the guitar strings. This was a very tedious process of making sure the yarn was straight and stayed in place.
I also added rainbow yarn to add interest and dimension to the guitar. I also covered wadded up paper balls to make the appearance of full balls of yarn. Lastly, I wished to make a music note surrounding the guitar, which was the most difficult part. Using wire and paper as the “skeleton”, I wrapped white yarn around the paper, and glued red yarn in the shape of music notes.
I was pleased with the outcome of the piece, and was surprised that I could make an interesting yet fun sculpture covered in yarn.
Posing with my piece at the CAC. Please excuse my strange posture, I suppose I was very excited to be showing at an actual renowned contemporary art center. The show was only up for two hours, and everyone took their pieces down. Even if it was short, it was a great experience to be able to have a piece shown in a space like that with all of my DAAP peers.
As for the sculpture, I still kept the guitar part, which I keep as a decorative piece lounging in my room.
Throwback Thursday: Mt. Adams Painting
This week’s throwback piece is from my junior year of high school. This is a landscape painting from a spot in Mt. Adams, Cincinnati. I got lots of positive feedback at the time on this painting, which I did not understand. Lots liked the window & door on the middle house, and liked the energy of the piece. I hated the black gate however, and still do hate it very much. But I don’t dislike this work, I just don’t feel any special connection to it or particularly enjoy looking at it. It isn’t terrible, it is pretty decent, especially because I was just learning how to paint at this time in my art career. I would change the perspective and make the lines more straight if I were to do this composition now.
In high school, we went to Mt. Adams a few times to sketch and take pictures for studio. Mt. Adams is a great art community, and have art walks often. It is a wonderful place for artists to convene, and holds many fond memories of those fun field trips with friends.
My father in particular really enjoyed this painting, so I gave it to him for Christmas that year, and it has been in his room ever since.
Doodles
Here are a few doodles from my sketchbook, this is a preview of material for my current collage piece I’m working on ! As you can see I am a big fan of sketching people & facial features.
My idea is to make use of my sketches outside the sketchbook. Stay tuned for the final piece!
Throwback Thursday: Muted Collages
This week’s throwback is taking a look at some old collages made my freshman year studying at DAAP. This turned out to be one of my favorite projects actually! It was challenging. I am a huge fan of scrapbooking, however do not often find the time for it as much as I’d like. In 2011 I was a more avid scrapbooker, so imagine my excitement of combining my love for art and scrapbooking in one! However, my first attempts failed because they were too “busy”. We made two preliminary rounds of collaging before the final collection. Layers of pencil, marker, paint, paper scraps, and other materials were cut and readjusted to come up with the final collage designs. The final product still retained lots of pops of color, which I like very much in my work, but managed to be easier on the eyes and not so busy. Using muted toned paper along with bright colors, I was pleased with the way these collages came out.
I believe I went on to incorporate these collages into some scrapbooks of mine, and liked the results.
Currently, I am working on a collage piece, which should be finished soon, which inspired this post. I love collage and should do more of it, it is a fun form of art that is easy to create! 
In the first collage, I like the subtle red squiggly lines the best. To create the smeared, ripped effect in these collages, I glued old sketches/pieces that I no longer liked and pulled them apart, which was an interesting effect!
This collage is perhaps the most dirty of all, I remember rubbing it with my shoe on the floor of one of the DAAP studios. Ick! However it has nice muted patterns from the gross floor, which added interesting texture.
This one has many fun details. I always look back and like fun line work. I don’t like how I made the two corners have collage squares leaving the rest of the paper blank, I wish I had a more clever composition.
I can’t wait to share my current collage project! Much different subject matter and approach, but I will try to use what I learned from this project and keep the new one from being too “busy” and overwhelming, as I tend to overdo it with color and lines.
The Girl with the Pearl Earring
For my painting studio, a take home assignment was given to us to make a master copy of an artist of our choice. I always loved the painting Girl With the Pearl Earring and I decided I wanted to paint it! I realized it was a HUGE undertaking, but I wanted to challenge myself.
I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much time on one painting before! I’m normally a very quick painter, so it is strange to not have a painting done in a few hours.This is one of the hardest paintings to copy, Vermeer has a style that is much different from my own.
THe most challenging feature was the lips.
To prepare for the painting, I made a small oil study in class, followed by some sketches to really make sure I understood how to recreate the facial features. The drawing became a fun abstract sketch, and I love it! It’s a little work of art that I am pleased with in itself.
Here is the final product! I’m pretty pleased with the way it turned out!!
Let It Out: Self Portrait Series
For my painting studio, I decided to focus on an emotional self portrait series. Much of my work is portraiture, and lately I have been focusing on rendering emotions in my work. The self portraits above are a reflection of a personal emotional experience I’ve had in the past year.
The past year has been a very difficult one for me emotionally. In the past few years, I have lost both my Grandmother and Grandfather, leaving me with only one grandparent, “Mama”. Losing both of my grandparents within a year of each other was very difficult for me, and in March of 2013, my Grandmother Mama was hospitalized, and things have not been quite the same since. The past 13 months have been a rollermcoaster of emotions. I was worried and scared that I might lose one of the most influential people in my life for quite some time. Then all of the sudden, I would receive news that she would be getting better, giving me feelings of relief. However, some of these feelings would be very short lived, because I would get more bad news. It seemed like just when everything was going to be alright, I would be told that there was cause to worry.
This constant change of information took a toll on me, and at one point, I was even afraid to feel anything. I felt as though every time I got my hopes up, they would just be crushed again. For a while I had shut off emotional responses to this situation. I am a “sensitive artist” if there ever was one. I have the tendency to cry a lot and get emotionally involved with everyone I love. Mama is one of the most important people in my life, and the realization that she could be gone at any time was wearing me thin.
Luckily, Mama is doing better nowadays and I get to visit her weekly. Although things are not the same as they used to be (I used to spend most of my Sundays with her going out to eat and watching classic films) I am thankful that I have had the opportunity to have more time with her. Emotionally, I am much better than I have been in the past few months. This portrait series is a way to express the way I felt for those difficult months adjusting to this scary life change.
The warm colored painting in the series is showing my exterior during this difficult time. Although inside I felt sadness and fear, I tried my best to put a happy face on. I gave the impression of the portrait being content, I felt painting a picture of pure joy would not relate to the series. The shy smile resembles one trying their best to mask their vulnerability. Also, I used a more blurry style while painting this, as the happy memories of me and my grandmother seemed distant and hazy at the time.
The blue colored painting is meant to have little to no emotion in the face, almost looking bored. I wanted to use a variety of blue hues to convey slight sadness. This portrait represents the depression I felt that started to settle in, and my emotions shutting off. For a time, I felt like I needed to shut off emotions to get through this situation.The blank, empty stare paired with teary eyes is exactly how I felt, struggling with sadness on the inside, but outwardly showing nothing. The style I tried to paint in mimicked a placid, bored exterior, no apparent style is visible.
The third and final portrait best displays the inner turmoil I was feeling. I wanted to convey emotional chaos using a myriad of colors and many energetic brushstrokes. This portrait shows me crying, emotionally unstable and overwhelmed. I feel this portrait is much more intense than the other two, which are used to balance and counteract this painting. The colorful crying portrait is meant to be an extreme combination of all the sadness and fear, unmasked and on display for all to see. I purposefully made the center portrait much larger than the other two, and applied thick dabs of paint. I realized later after looking at a Van Gogh book, I had a similar style to his painterly strokes without intending it. This is my favorite portrait from the series, in a weird way this painting was a way to let all of the feelings I had bottled up out in the open. It is different than a lot of other portraits that I have done in the past, and I was excited with the result.
Most of my work is created spontaneously, and I normally do not have an idea I try to convey. This work I planned ahead of time and actually wanted to have emotional meaning behind it, and was pleased with the result. I feel this series is more meaningful to me than a lot of my recent work. The series was fun to paint and was a good emotional release for me. I hope to continue to paint more portraits such as these in the future.
Plein Air at Lone Pine Farm
Today I went Plein Air painting with my Mother, Mary Beth Thompson Dowlin and the Brush and Pallet Painters. It was the first time in a long while that I’ve painted something from life, and not a photograph. I LOVE painting outside, it’s a great way to enjoy sunshine and practice painting landscapes. We all painted at my Aunt Nancy’s farm, which is one of my favorite spots in Ohio. There are so many pretty spots to paint, it was difficult making a decision this morning! I finally decided on a pair of beautiful apple trees. I really like painting trees, but need more practice. I went for an impressionism style with thick paint application, inspired by Monet and Van Gogh, two of my favorites.
Here is today’s product :
Next time, I will have to be more prepared! I left behind some materials, and it was quite windy. I look forward to painting Au Plein Air more often this summer!
Emotional Photography Portrait Project
For my final in my photography class, I decided to make a collage of various portraits of my friends portraying various emotions. Sadness, Anger, Shock, and Happiness were the four emotions I ended up using. I enhanced the portraits in Photoshop by cropping and making them all black and white. This project was a fun exercise seeing how a myriad of people who are not artists or actors would depict feelings. It turned out that most of the models used similar behaviors to represent emotion. For instance, to show sadness, every model looked downward, happiness every model crinkled their nose, and shock entailed raised eyebrows and widened eyes. I would love to continue this project moving forward, and would like to improve my photography and portrait skills.
The following are the cropped close up versions of the portraits:
ANGER
HAPPINESS
SADNESS
Here are the full, non cropped portraits that I believed best represented each emotion:
Bailey Dowlin Art 
