Response Artwork: Ellsworth Kelly

My last project was a piece I made inspired by the work of Ellsworth Kelly. Kelly’s work is characterized mainly by two different styles: images of nature drawn with simple contour lines in black and white and abstract images featuring simple geometric shapes in bold colors. Here are two example of his work.
               

 For my project, I decided to combine these ideas. I drew a sunflower with a simple black line and had the background filled with small yellow, orange, green and brown squares. I thought of a sunflower because I was just in Kansas visiting family and the sunflower is their state flower. I originally was thinking of doing a rose or daisy, but I liked how sunflowers are more uncommon and are only made up by a few colors. During the class critique, I feel that people thought my idea was interesting and creative. They liked the colors in the background and noticed that the colors of the squares are the colors that make up the sunflower. People thought it was interesting how I left no color in the flower, but then added the color to a completely filled background instead. One student made the comment that my design made the background equally as important as the flower. The background is not really a usual background because it grabs your attention just as much as the flower does. If I redid this project I would consider making the outline of the flower a little more bold, per one student’s suggestion. Others liked the idea that the colors for each square were chosen randomly by a program on my calculator. It would be cool to expand this project. One idea was to make a series of these pieces and put them next to each other. I was also thinking that it would be interesting to experiment with size and to make a larger version of this piece.