Artist: Marc Magpili
Title: Solitude
Medium: Acrylic, Book Page on Canvas, 12" x 14"
Solitude is a mixed media, non-representational artwork on canvas. Made by dripping and splattering paint on a canvas with its center masked and painted gold, along with ripped pages of a book and the artist's name in the middle. Solitude aims to show viewers the utopia that one feels by themselves, surrounded by the things they like, away from the never ending chaos of the world.
The artist initially wanted to combine the media of ink and acrylic by making a blank space in the middle of the canvas and drawing a chair surrounded by a non-representational background. Eventually, he decided to replace the chair with a blind contour self portrait which unfortunately did not work out. With all options exhausted, the artist painted over the blank space with gold paint, a staple seen in his past artworks, and pasted ripped book pages around its border.
This painting is an attempt to explore action painting with the use of splattering acrylic paint on the canvas through heavy flicks of the wrist. The artist used a triadic color combination with purple, orange, and cyan to show that there still is beauty in chaos. Book pages were also used to show ruggedness and represent the solitary utopia that one confines themselves in.
Solitude aims to show two sides of a story. The paradise and the chaos. It invites the viewers to look at the painting and see the coordination in the catastrophe of the non-representational background with the triadic color scheme and drips of cyan and orange paint on a purple background. Amidst all of this lies a golden box surrounded by torn book pages and the artist's name highlighted in the middle, meant to represent how the artist feels safe and in his habitat when surrounded by the things he like.
This work relates to how the world in its entirety is beautiful. There is beauty in chaos just as there is beauty in solitude. With all the elements of this artwork meant to work together despite seeming unconventional, Solitude also seeks to convey that there is always a bigger plan in the grand scheme of things, and how just as Bob Ross said, "There are no mistakes, just happy accidents".
