On the social web, Thursdays are special. For about ten years now, Throwback Thursday has been a thing, in which one posts pictures of things that are vintage or classic, but in 2011, it took off as a hashtag on Instagram, where people posted pictures of themselves some time ago. I’ve dug up a few old photos at my parents’ house, like this one from when we went to Europe when I turned eighteen.
Rather than post old pictures of myself here on my blog (that’s what Instagram is for, right?) I’ll post pictures of my old art. I don’t know how long this will last or if I’ll keep it up, but it might be fun to see where my art has been and how it got to where it is today. Know yourself, and all that. Plus, while I showed you older works in the context of what influenced me, I thought it would be fun to look at things I’ve done just in the sense of what I painted or drew in the past. Throwback Thursday. Because nostalgia is fun.
So without further ado…
Throwback Thursday: College Edition, #1: The Classic-Romantic Split
Yup, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance made quite an impression on me in college. So I painted it. I’ve blogged about the ideas several times, most recently here.
I painted this in 1999 or 2000, while I was in college. With the motorcycle as a metaphor (as in the book), I split it in two, showing the left side as an abstracted blueprint and the right side painted colorfully and expressively with a split-complementary color scheme. I’m pretty sure I was listening to jazz when I painted the right-brained side. I know for a fact that the tight line art took several days to complete, but the loose palette-knife work took me about 45 minutes.
When I showed it to a friend who was an engineering major, he got it immediately even though he hadn’t read the book. He knew he was the left side, and he preferred it over the right.
