Splintered Statue

I am not sure why I wanted to draw and draw this scene from The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat. It was how much emotion I felt when we first read this chapter. It made me the artist in me so mad that Ka’s Father just threw an art piece that his daughter worked so hard on in a lake where no one will be able to see it, with the risk of it breaking for the little time it had been in the water by the time Ka found out about his actions. I also added the words that the class defined Ka’s dad as because Danticat never gives him the proper name, so we are left to call him “Ka’s dad”, “Anne’s Daughter”, “The man who killed Dany’s parents”, etc. I defiantly wanted to add more to the painting such as wood splintering off and breaking off the carved statue as explained in The Book of Life chapter of The Dew Breaker. This is where I would have had rather put the titles that the readers are forced to put onto Ka’s Dad instead of having them floating awkwardly in the water.  

While looking at my references and tutorials a lot of them were very bright and whimsical but I wanted more of a dark and gloomy feeling. I didn’t want sun to be reaching the statue underwater to keep in theme of the darker moments and themes in the book. While I was drawing digitally, I also really wanted this art piece to be lineless, I’m not too sure why. Perhaps it could be the fact that the reader had to read between the lines and make their own connections.

I was really inspired by the way that Ashley Krieger painted her sand and that’s what I based mine off of. I was also inspired by the way she drew her light, but I wanted my painting to be darker, so I did not use this. I looked at a lot of references on Pinterest and the one by Gamze Olgun stood out to me the most. I looked at the darker colors on the right side of the art piece and incorporated them into my own. Lastly, I used the images of the pensive sculptures as inspiration. I knew I had a certain pose from the book, but I was also looking at the way the anatomy of these sculptures was present. If I had more time, I think I would have replicated the marks from the tools used to make these as well as maybe turn the statue around so you could see the cracks on the back, and use inspiration from the first image on the website.

Sources:  

Createful Art with Ashley Krieger. “How to Paint in Acrylics | Easy Underwater Ocean Painting Tutorial | 15-20 Minute Painting!” YouTube, 28 June 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWdBvP_q9KE. 

Danticat, Edwidge. The Dew Breaker. 2004, ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA78346721. 

Mary. “Painting.” Pinterest, 2 Jan. 2019, www.pinterest.com/pin/693132198877876689. 

Noorata, Pinar. “Lifelike Wood Sculptures of Pensive Men and Women.” My Modern Met, 16 June 2016, mymodernmet.com/bruno-walpoth-wood-sculptures.