Diamond's Q4 Benchmark

For this benchmark, I focused on an artist who I honestly believe could have been the complete opposite of me, besides us both being Libras, but, he stood out to me. Mark Rothko, an American painter of Russian Jewish descent. I believe the thing about him that caught my attention was that he was very conservative and he didn’t say much about his inspiration, influences, or how his art connected to him so, his art was open for any type of interpretation. Rothko also never identified himself as any specific type of artist, he was very flexible with his expression through art and his pieces that I looked at seemed very interesting. For my Rothko inspired piece, I decided to a spin off one of simple, yet open for interpretation creations. This piece was left unnamed but, on most of the sources that I saw the piece on, it was referred to as Black on Grey. After doing some research on the piece, I was able to discover exactly how Rothko made his original piece. Supposedly, he used acrylic paint on a canvas. So, I took the same steps to try and recreate the original piece. When I first saw the painting, I saw it from the perspective as someone standing on the moon so, I added my own spin to it by adding stars to the black portion to make it look like a sky. I’m proud of the work that I have produced because I feel that I have been able to show that art can be interpreted in many different ways. In the past, I usually made all of my art relate to some type of scenery usually revolved around nature. This is close but, is in a sense different. With this being the last art project of my high school career, I will remember this as a milestone. I admit, when I chose this art piece to reinterpret, I chose it because it was simple but, I was able to get my creative juices flowing and I proved to myself that I can think outside of the box. I hope for others to look at my work and find it interesting and inspiring. I learned some new things such as how to create my own canvas, and I learned more about what you can do what acrylic paint and how to alter original colors. If I were able to do this all over again, maybe I would decide to be more detailed or be more creative meaning, I could add in spaceships, or aliens to express my creativity and art style. I took a simple acrylic painting and turned it into a story and I want this to be evident when people view my work.