Sarah Z. 16x20" Oil on canvas "Shoes"

When presented with the opportunity to do a painting of my choice I
was eager to jump upon the still life I had been waiting years to do. I
decided to do an individual still life containing my younger sister?s
stilettos. The sharp angles and vibrant colors were a challenge in the
beginning but through discovery had proved to work well within the
piece.
Some of the elements I used within my final piece were as follows.
Spacing, I wanted the shoes to look as though they had fallen into
their places, which proved to be quite the task, after many thumbnails
I had fallen upon this composition. Next, I wanted all of the shoes to
be within the canvas but, the image looked cluttered and wasn?t
aesthetically pleasing by instruction from my professor to have some of
the shoes run off of the canvas and become larger in scale. This
helped the piece by giving me more room to create and blend color. The
texture of my paint is more matted than others I chose to have a soft
and creamy paint method as opposed to tiny splotches of color. The
colors I used within the piece are the true colors of the shoes, I
tried tying all of the pieces together by using the color of a previous
shoe to lighten and darken the next. The visual weight amongst the
piece is balanced by the positioning of the shoes and the angle at
which they are placed. Overall I am satisfied with the piece, if I had
the opportunity to do it all over again there are some things I would
have done differently. For example, the black shoe on the left of the
canvas, the color of the shoe was hard to tie into the piece and the
highlights that were being reflected could have been integrated better.
The title I was going for with the piece was ?Shoe Graveyard?, the
idea of all these beautiful shoes sitting alone unworn and uncared for
yet elegant and edgy. There was no feministic alterior motive within
the piece. Although, the shoes do portray a sort of feminine appeal.