Title: The Guiding Hand
Size: 14 inches x 18 inches
Medium: Acrylic painting
Date of Completion: April 2024
A driver is distracted by a pointing hand that covers his eyes. Inspired by "The Son of Man" by Rene Magritte, "The Guiding Hand" represents the feeling of becoming overwhelmed with someone else's viewpoint on how you should manage your life. Everyone has different perspectives on how young adults should act, feel, and make decisions. Though these people have good intentions of guiding others, sometimes they become unaware of how their opinions prevent someone from focusing on themselves. The driver represents a young person trying to navigate through life, and the pointing hand is someone else trying to help them go in the right direction, but they become the reason the driver cannot clearly see ahead of them.
Size: 14 inches x 18 inches
Medium: Acrylic painting
Date of Completion: April 2024
A driver is distracted by a pointing hand that covers his eyes. Inspired by "The Son of Man" by Rene Magritte, "The Guiding Hand" represents the feeling of becoming overwhelmed with someone else's viewpoint on how you should manage your life. Everyone has different perspectives on how young adults should act, feel, and make decisions. Though these people have good intentions of guiding others, sometimes they become unaware of how their opinions prevent someone from focusing on themselves. The driver represents a young person trying to navigate through life, and the pointing hand is someone else trying to help them go in the right direction, but they become the reason the driver cannot clearly see ahead of them.
Inspiration
The Son of Man by Rene Magritte
Rene Magritte was born in Belgium in 1898, and throughout his childhood he experienced financial and emotional struggles. Staying in a single location was difficult due to financial struggles outside of his control, and he suffered a major loss when his mother committed suicide in 1912. In 1916 he studied in the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts. This allowed him to be inspired by art movements that were inspired by Picasso. He was most inspired by a surrealist artist named Giorgio de Chirico, because he was fascinated at how juxtaposition of mundane objects could alter the mood of a painting. He created his own surrealist paintings, inducing feeling of curiosity and confusion, altering meanings between objects that shocked audiences. The 1930s was a successful period for Rene Magritte, as his art became more famous internationally. He moved to France and then moved back to Belgium, which would cause him trouble with his career during the second world war. Throughout the rest of his life he continued to pursue and obtain success with his surreal paintings, the most famous being The Son of Man, which he calls his self portrait. Rene Magritte died in 1967, and is remembered for his contribution to the surrealist movement.
What I like about this painting is the mystery that is present all throughout it. The unidentified location, and unidentified man. Although Magritte stated that it is his self-portrait, we never see his face, which raises a debate whether or not it can be called a self-portrait. When I first saw this painting, I had a bit of a frustrated feeling that there was a random apple right in front of Magritte's face, so I was forced to stare at it, instead of what I wanted to see. Magritte did a perfect job at invoking curiosity and frustration at the same time within the audience, by blocking out something so vital to a painting with something that the viewer does not want to see. I was inspired by the feelings of frustration that this painting gave me, and I wanted to create something similar but connect it to my theme of coming of age.
What I like about this painting is the mystery that is present all throughout it. The unidentified location, and unidentified man. Although Magritte stated that it is his self-portrait, we never see his face, which raises a debate whether or not it can be called a self-portrait. When I first saw this painting, I had a bit of a frustrated feeling that there was a random apple right in front of Magritte's face, so I was forced to stare at it, instead of what I wanted to see. Magritte did a perfect job at invoking curiosity and frustration at the same time within the audience, by blocking out something so vital to a painting with something that the viewer does not want to see. I was inspired by the feelings of frustration that this painting gave me, and I wanted to create something similar but connect it to my theme of coming of age.
Planning
I realized that throughout life, there are many people around us that try to guide us and give us advice on how we should handle ourselves and our future. People such as parents, grandparents, teachers, friends and strangers all think differently about life, and all these groups of people share advice on how to live a good life. Although advice can be helpful and life-changing, too much advice, too much contradicting or forceful advice can drown the noise of our own thoughts and cause confusion and frustration. I wanted to dramatize a situation where someone who is trying to obtain control of their own self is being distracted by the people around them. I wanted to capture the panic in the subject and in the audience.
I drew an idea of what I wanted to capture. A situation where someone needs to focus on themselves but can be easily distracted is when driving. Something that is vital to that is sight. If someone can't see while they are driving, they are going to get into an accident. To connect to my inspiration, Son of Man, I wanted to make the person be distracted by someone who has intentions of being helpful but ends up being the reason the driver cannot see. I planned to make an anonymous hand point in the direction they think the driver should go to, but by doing so they are blocking the eyes of the driver. This causes the driver to panic because now they cannot focus on the path they very clearly wanted to go to, and that can cause an accident. The hand represents the people in life that have good intentions of guiding a person through life, but can accidentally be ignorant to the way the other person wants to manage themselves.
Process
I made a grid on the board that I was going to draw on. I made a grid to copy the image directly onto the board. Then, while referencing my final drawing, I sketched the image onto the board. This was different from my illustration process where I traced the image. Since this image was a bit more complex, I decided to draw it instead to save time. That process was actually easier than tracing, because I did not have to constantly re-trace over and over again. I started drawing the picture from the bottom, up, because I wanted to get over the hardest part, which was drawing hands. After that I drew the clothes, the neck, the distracting hand and then the rest of the head that was not covered up by the hand.
Starting with the foreground, I painted the outside of the car a bright red with shadows on the left side. I was using acrylics for this so the drying process was quick and it was easy to layer many colors of red on top of each other. Since I knew that painting the person and the hands was going to involve more detail and experimentation with skin color, I painted the background (inside of the car) a solid black. I did solid black because Son of Man has an eerie background, and I wanted to emphasize the sense of panic that the person was feeling, so I used black to emphasize that fear. Furthermore I did not want to make a detailed background that distracted the viewer from the situation. Since I was using black, I painted the steering wheel a dark grey to make it different from the background. To add texture, I used a small brush and added some dots of black and white to show how the lighting highlights the texture. After that I acknowledged the shirt was not going to have as much detail as everything else, so I made it a solid shade of grey-blue that I would add more layers to after it dried.
Experimentation
In the meantime, I experimented with colors by practicing how to make skin color. I used the primary colors to make a base color. I mixed an even amount of red, yellow, and blue to see what color it made. It made a pretty dark color so I added white. The color looked like I had mixed black and white together, so I added more yellow to make a different shade. The picture on the left shows my process of adding yellow to the mixture, and then red, and progressively adding more white. I was experimenting as I kept mixing the same four colors over and over again to get varying results. In between this experimentation I added some of the more bright orange shade onto the canvas which I realized was a mistake, and that made me go back into the palette to add more red and white.
The picture on the left shows the time where I added the color that was too orange. I did not add more of it because I did not even want to keep it as a base color. After I added more red and a lot of white, and even a tiny bit of blue to the mixture I went back and kept painting the skin. This time it looked better and so I used that same shade and added it to the neck, face, and some on the hands. The hands on the picture on the right have varying shades because I tried to copy the lighting from the picture I took of myself. At this stage some of the finger also looked too orange, mostly on the hand on the left side of the painting, while the other hand looked more natural. To make the shading of the hand I mixed brown with the base color I used for the skin.
Process
The skin color for the other arm was made by adding more white to the base color of the skin, with a bit more blue added in. This makes the hand almost look grey in comparison, but because the hand is not supposed to be represented in a positive way, I let it be. To paint the edges more precisely, I used a brush with a fine tip so that there would be no accidental light-colored splotches on a dark background. There were some very small splotches of light paint on the background, but I used the same brush and painted over the mistakes with black to clean it up. Once the base of all the skin tones was finished, I moved on to the shading. Firstly I shaded the hands, and softened the contrast because it did not match the rest of the piece like planned. I softened the contrast between the tip and bottom of the fingers on both hands but still made gradation noticeable. I outlined the hands in a semi-light brown. I used a more orange version of the base skin tone to make shadows that were not too dramatic, because the colors did not blend easily enough to achieve that effect well enough. After that was done I moved onto the final details, such as the hair, which was just brown with light brown highlights at the top, the dark brown eyebrows, and the lips. The lip color was achieved by adding more red to the base skin color. The shadows on the pointing hand were created by adding some grey-red to the bottom of the arm because it is meant to look unpleasant.
Critique
The most obvious similarity between my piece and Son of Man is the way that the subject's face is being covered up by another object. I think that this gesture creates a similar feeling of frustration within the viewer, because something that should not be blocking the way of someone's face is there anyway. Something else that is similar between both pieces is the simplicity of the setting and the person. Although my background does not show anything, I think that it is possible to tell the setting is in a car, but no background is necessary because it would distract the viewer what is happening in the foreground. Son of Man does this as well to some extent, because the setting of the background is very liminal and simple, so that does not make the viewer pay more attention to the background than the foreground.
Some differences include the set-up and colors. Son of Man shows more of the man in a still figure not in motion, showing no emotion. His face is covered by an apple that is magically floating, and that creates confusion and annoyance within the viewer. My piece, however, takes a more logical approach with blocking the face of the driver, and the driver shows more emotion with the mouth, curved eyebrows, hand position, and raised shoulders. Magritte was also able to add more depth to his because because he used oil paints while I used acrylic.
Some differences include the set-up and colors. Son of Man shows more of the man in a still figure not in motion, showing no emotion. His face is covered by an apple that is magically floating, and that creates confusion and annoyance within the viewer. My piece, however, takes a more logical approach with blocking the face of the driver, and the driver shows more emotion with the mouth, curved eyebrows, hand position, and raised shoulders. Magritte was also able to add more depth to his because because he used oil paints while I used acrylic.
Reflection
Overall, I like the outcome of this project. My favorite part was adding the final touches to create more depth, because I think that creates more unity in it. My least favorite part was painting the skin because I lack practice in that, and I did not use a reference to copy off of this time (like in my illustration) so I had to make a lot of guesses. I think that my piece connects to Son of Man very well, regarding surface level comparison along with the feelings it invokes in a viewer. I wanted to exaggerate the feeling that the subject feels in the painting so the viewer could feel panicked and uncomfortable too. I hope other people are able to feel the panic when they see the work and understand how others feel when they want to take control over their lives.
ACT
Clearly explain how you are able to identify the cause effect relationship between your inspiration and its effect on your artwork?
The inpiration that comes from Son of Man is the desire to see behind an object blocking something important.
What is the overall approach the author has regarding the topic of your inspiration?
The author connects how Rene Magritte's life and emotion affect his surrealism art. Magritte was a huge contributor to popularizing surrealism.
What kind of generalizations and conclusions have you discovered about people, ideas, culture, etc. while you researched your inspiration?
Restricting viewers from seeing faces can cause panic
What is the central idea or theme around your inspirational research?.
Surrealism art and how ideas are presented
What kind of inferences did you make while reading your research?
Surrealism can make an audience study an artwork more than realism
“René Magritte - Paintings, Art & Surrealism.” Biography, 21 Aug. 2019, www.biography.com/artists/rene-magritte.