What Is The Raft Of The Medusa

For project 3, One Bar, my largest painting to date, and a continuation of my cell phones in historical paintings, I used a previously used canvas. I sanded the previous work until smooth, and primed it with oil primer. Sketched out a cropped image of Gericult’s Raft of the Medusa, it has been in my mind for a couple years to do this painting with the survivors holding cell phones instead of pieces of cloth and trying to get reception from a distant cell tower instead of a rescue ship.

The elements that I focused this work on were composition and color, and texture. I cropped the original Raft of the Medusa, in a manner to give a triangle shape with a line of 3 cell phones pointed obliquely towards the summit of people on the raft. I played

with the colors, not wanting such a low key palette, and made the colors more brilliant, especially the water. In doing such a large piece, I took the opportunity to use larger brushes and used more paint, this allowed some texture to show that had not been in my previous work.
I was of coarse influenced by Gericult, but also indirectly by John Singer Sargent’s style of a looser brush stroke. In looking at the website Artsy, I came across George Morton-Clark, Morton-Clark has incorporated cellphones as a main component of his work, I was not influenced so much by Morton-Clark’s style, but content.
The strength that I am most proud of at the point in painting is the proportions and rendering of the figures in my work.
The weakness in this piece is the lower, yellow part of the sky is a bit too bright for the rest of the image.