Artist Comparison

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I decided to use Herman Lee for my artist comparison. The first piece that I saw of his was a series about Great Romans and they were portrait pieces. He has five pieces in this series that contain five different Roman people. They happen to be portraits of a person in vector/illustrative style. I decided to use this as a starting block for my piece. Instead of doing a leading figure in our today society as my portrait piece, I chose to do myself. Doing a portrait of yourself to me is harder to manage then doing a portrait of another person. Doing a portrait of yourself is hard to me because it involves figuring out what side of you, as a person, you want to be seen as or what you want to be seen as. You have to show a piece of who you are as a person and be quite vulnerable to the viewers, so I decided to go outside my comfort zone for this piece.

Herman Lee’s Great Romanians series intrigued me because all the portraits have a disperse use of vibrant colors in them, which is similar to my work. The vibrant colors allow for a sense of playfulness and randomness. They way he placed the colors gives a sense that he had fun while making them, as well as giving it a feel of having paint smeared onto the piece randomly, even though it is all done electronically. The piece is “is filled with colors of all sorts that are meant to turn heads (Osnat Tzadok: 2002-2010)” The portraits that he has done for this series are up close and only include the head, with the neck as well. Some other portraits that he has done also included the top portion of their clothes. Herman Lee does all his work on the computer and most of it is in vector/illustrator format.

Since I was going outside my comfort zone for this piece I wanted to display my...

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...h what the world is looking for. The only hard part about using someone, so new in this industry is that he doesn’t have a lot said about him, if anything at all. It is a shame that on his site he does not give any reasons or intent about his pieces. He just has the titles of his pieces and a lot of it is assuming what he means by what he is trying to imply. “By trying to decipher the painting in this way, I was doing what I suppose most people do when they look at art, seeking a narrative or at least enough clues to one that I could begin to assemble a story out of what I was seeing. With all art, from the representational to the abstract, one tends to look for correspondences to what one knows; even before learning the title (Michael Milburn: 2009),” which means that I was trying to “to find something recognizable in (Michael Milburn: 2009)” the Great Romanians.

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