Despair

This was my first piece in oil pastel for the past year. It is a wooden mask with a bird on its right ear, a peruvian maraca laying in front of it. It is laying on top of a black piece of fabric.The theme for this piece was "Darkness Within", which is why I had the dark piece of fabric behind the mask, so that one could see the 'darkness' through the eyes and mouth of the mouth. I got the idea for the smears of black on the white side of the piece from the book "A Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In the end of that book, the town it is based on gets blown away by an 'evil wind'. I just liked the image that that gave me, so I incorporated it into the piece. I did the smears by rubbing my fingers from the black fabric into the white space after fresh oil pastel had been applied on the fabric. I also liked the sense of balance and symmetry that the way it is split into two areas of black and white give the piece, and the contrast just makes it more interesting to the viewer.

.September