Luke Miller Buchanan Piece Part 1

Luke Miller Buchanan Piece Part 2

After seeing the work of Luke Miller Buchanan and learning about the painting technique he has developed, I was challenged with creating a piece using his methods. I chose to do Reynolda Village, a favorite place of mine in my hometown of Winston-Salem. For this technique, I began with taking panorama pictures, both horizontal and vertical, of places throughout Reynolda Village that I like. Using Luke’s method, I created my own scene of Reynolda Village and took creative liberties of placing things with each other that in real-life are not actually in those locations. Most of Luke’s work focuses on buildings so I wanted to get one of the most recognizable buildings of Reynolda Village in my painting. Also indicative of Luke’s style is creating “visual hick-ups” and fragmenting buildings to give them an abstract feel. This piece was all about the process and starting with very light tints of colors over the whole piece and slowly building on it. This was something I was not used to doing and it took some getting used to. The support used was a piece of wood and adhered the photos with gel medium and created a layer of this on the board as my ground. I was challenged with merging the photos with painting to make it blend and become unified instead of having harsh lines where the photo stopped and the painting began. I found the method of combining photos with painting to be a really fun technique and this project is by far my favorite one I did this semester.

Rene Magrite Inspired Still Life

This still was was inspired by the style of Rene Magritte. While he spent time painting in different styles, I chose to focus on his surrealist works. With this piece, I experimented with a few new things like using a color ground and drawing out contour lines in different colors before starting. I really think the color ground helped me with this piece because I did not have that fear of the blank white canvas staring at me and not knowing where to start. I also used the contour lines to help guide my painting. While this was really just outlining what I had already drawn on the canvas, it still served as a nice starting point. I used canvas as my support with oil paint as my medium. While I have painted plenty of times on canvas, this was my first time painting with oil on canvas. It was different at first, but I quickly got used to it. In order to mimic Magritte’s style, I used vivid colors and created “visual hick-ups” to give the viewer a sense of confusion when looking at the piece. I also incorporated portions of sky throughout the piece, a technique common to his style which caused for a more surrealist look. In addition, I fragmented objects to add to the surrealist look. While some aspects of the fragmenting are obvious at first glance, such as the skull, others such as the chair do not catch the viewers eye immediately. Overall this was a fun project and I learned a lot about the surrealist time period as well as gained some technical skills in painting that I had struggled with prior such as adding dimension to objects.