Creative Assignment 1

When I first started planning out what I wanted to do for this assignment, I started by basing it off of the model I was going to use. I knew that going into this assignment I wanted to do portraits and do it with one of my friends. I decided to do Frida Khalo because my friend whom I was going to photograph loves Frida Khalo and also looks a lot like her. Frida Khalo is known for her self portrait paintings. She started painting after she was severely injured in a bus accident. Her paintings were realistic but had some surrealistic elements to them which can make them more interesting. Most of her paintings influenced highly by traumatic physical and psychological events that have happened to her throughout her life. I think that is why she uses a lot more surrealistic elements in her paintings to try and convey different feelings and events that happened to her. When appropriating her paintings I wanted to use the same compositions and styles of the painting, but changing up the elements in the painting to make it different. The paintings that I decided to appropriate were “Me and My Parrots” and “Self Portrait, Dedicated to Dr. Eloesser”. When appropriating Me and My Parrots I decided to compose my friend the same way but add in her pet cat which would replicate the parrots in the painting. In “Self Portrait, Dedicated to Dr. Eloesser” I did a more subtle approach to the appropriate. It is the same composition and styling but instead of her having a flower crown i create an abstract floral background to mimic that. I also replaced her hand earring with a paw of a cat.