Portfolio: 'Looking Sharp'

I created 'Looking Sharp' my Creation Pictorale course at the Sorbonne. The prompt was to make a painting that portrays the 'irreducible essence of painting,' with particular regard to the philosophy of Clement Greenberg, major American art critic of 20th century painting. This link has some good info on Greenberg if you are interested. He was a big champion of Abstract Expressionism, and advocated for the work of Jackson Pollock before Jackson Pollock was a sensation.

One element of abstract expressionist art is that the painting ceases to be a representation of something else, and is simply itself — a painting. To get this idea across abstract expressionists deftly employed color, texture and simplicity to bring the focus back to the physical object of the painting. 

In this way, the 'essence' of painting became it's presence as a physical object. Before, painting had merely been a means to an end. Now the painting itself was the end. In a sense, the painting gained a consciousness, it gained an awareness of self. 

In 'Looking Sharp,' a single painted blue circle regards itself in the mirror. The simplicity in composition heralds back to the abstract expressionists, and the mirror is meant to evoke the idea of painting gaining an awareness of itself and becoming it's own subject.