“This summer I was up north and I took a bunch of pictures,” says senior art major Elizabeth Gunden, “and I took this one photo of a milkweed pod that I really liked.” Our Artist of the Week explains how that particular photo inspired her oil painting. “Sometimes my inspirations come from photos, other times I’ll paint on location. I like to have some sort of connection with what I paint.”
Gunden describes her painting as a “high contrast, really dark, really light, abstract interpretation” of the original photo. She explains that this semester she’s been trying different forms of painting, and exploring “painting more loosely, instead of tightly.” For this reason, Gunden set her mind on painting this untitled painting with a big brush and decided that before starting the painting she would not draw anything beforehand. “What I did do,” she said, “is take the photo and put it in Photoshop and made it really high contrast. I wanted to do a darker painting.” She also chose to use a cloth in order to smooth out certain areas. “I didn’t plan for it to be dark and with high contrast,” she says. “It’s just kind of how I’ve been working this semester.”
