Female portraiture

For this project. I wanted to create works of art that held visually striking and color experimental qualities. I am influenced by Frida Kahlo, in her sense of portraiture and incorporation of nature and their symbolism tied to pain and emotion. Kahlo's work inspires me because of her use of color, nature, and figures in her paintings. She put a lot of her personal life following her nearly fatal injuries, into her work, like her sexuality, emotions. pain, thoughts. and desires. Although she used primarily oils to paint, she used her medium in a way that gave a sense of understanding the relation between canvas and pigment, and let the medium have its own part of the piece, aside from subject matter. l wanted my pieces to capture the same aspects. Kahlo also did many self portraits where she is surrounded by animals, like birds and monkeys, or nature, like leaves and flowers and branches. Her skin tones had a lot of variety in colors and tones, with red cheeks and lips, which my work usually also portrays. I really wanted to capture different medium's qualities and how they can play together on a page to create visually interesting images, as well as holding on to the idea of the woman's and flora's beauty compared to the medium's beauty, in the same sense that Kahlo’s work interests and influences myself. The reason I chose women and flora as the subject is because they both have a softness and delicacy to their features that I find interesting to use with medium I also see similar qualities in, like watercolors and gouaches. There is also a distinct beauty in painting on paper that I think matches well with the features of a woman or a flower