Saturday, 2 July 2011

Sneak Peek

The Fallen, oil on canvas, 34x48"

I've been busy working on my upcoming show at LeBasse Projects (Los Angeles) which opens in 2 weeks time. Here is a sneak peek of one of the paintings for the show. This is my first time working with real models and I had this great (?!) idea to make a large group painting inspired by traditional narrative paintings like you find in museums. The painting resembles an ambiguous, imaginary folktale. My sister and I have been making up stories for it ranging from killing the village maiden to finding a snow white girl mysteriously lying in a field.

I have now discovered that painting so many figures is an insane amount of work! It's like doing 6 portraits in the one painting. I think I spent almost 2 months just on this one work, which is why the upcoming show has less than 10 paintings in it.

Some detail images:




7 comments:

Kaspian Shore said...

Melissa, this is such an incredible painting. I love your work, so glad to finally see a sneak peek for your new show. I hope it'll be a huge success!

Maribellum said...

This looks amazing! I love the way the background fades into a fog and the crisp-ness of the images is so unique to your work. I love it.

Jess said...

Stunning work! :)x

Unknown said...

So nice !...
Ciao from Italy
=^.^=

Anonymous said...

wow! did you paint these? they look computer generized !!!!

Rose Calamero said...

gorgeous dear =)

Babe said...

This is incredible. It really looks like a picture. Such an awesome work.
xx