Painting Inspirations

Our next trip was to the art museum next to studio. There we were each assigned a painting to use as our Ranch precedent.  My painting was done by Maud Gatewood when she was still a college student here at UNCG. "Maud painted what she saw and she was a very keen observer," said her longtime friend Dot Hodges, who was also a co-owner of a Charlotte gallery.  Her paintings were always daring like "nothing escaped her curiosity. She loved capturing the moment and she lived for these moments in her artwork.  Her life was simply about her artwork, nothing else mattered. "She did believe there's order in nature," Hodges said. "She would look at things and find the natural patterns." Gatewood graduated from Woman's College (now UNC Greensboro) with a degree in fine arts in 1954. From then on she went to several Universities to teach and continued to flourish in her artwork as one o the most well known North Carolina painters. Her friends would always say, "She lived to paint; she didn't live to promote herself. She felt she was a decent painter, but she just didn't seek out notoriety."

This painting, because it was one of her earlier works, seems to fit her title as an artist at the time. Her Art instructor was said to be cruel and did not let the women venture off into their own art style very much. When looking at this painting, I can see the struggles between what she wants to paint, and the world that is confining her.  It is tough to say how I might apply this to my “Ranch” project.  I feel that it would be interesting to play with contrasting elements to give the room a slight sense of confusion without creating chaos. I want the viewer to feel succumbed by my space, like each space fits into the other to make him feel a sense of “lost” and “wander” I have to play with how I will turn this feeling into something positive. I want to focus on the feelings that the paintings gave me and the fact that it is so different from any other paintings Maud did in her professional career.  It seems as though I might be playing with a play on boundaries with this project because this is the first painting in which she pushed outside of her boundaries as much as she could.