Details
Progress
This piece was from a project aimed at creating an unconventional portrait of an artist from history. After doing some research on artistic movements and the most prevalent artists of those times, I settled on the Dada movement and Marcel Duchamp. I chose him because he used his work to poke fun at art in the form of ‘ready-mades’, such as Prelude to a Broken Arm and Fountain, and raise the question; What is art?. After looking through his works, I decided on a postcard of the Mona Lisa that he had drawn on and titled L.H.O.O.Q., a play on the French words for “She has a hot ass”.
Marcel was active during the Dada movement, which was known for absurd pieces of visual, musical, and performance art. One of the common methods used was collage, so I wanted my piece to reflect that. With it being a portrait, I needed to include Duchamp’s face, and with using L.H.O.O.Q. as inspiration, the Mona Lisa had to make an appearance as well. The final step in this process was to find a hot ass to pair the other elements with. Naturally, I went to Google images with the name of the woman who possesses one of the hottest asses of this generation, Nicki Minaj, and found the last piece of the puzzle. With all the references found, I put them together into a composition and began the real work.
The face is done using charcoal, the torso was created using chalk pastels, and the legs were painted with acrylics. This piece is one of my favorites because of all the research and work put into it. It remains one of my favorites, not only because of the way it looks, but because it reflects my sense of humor as well; kind of weird but not without thought.
