30-J-LoLV3
©2010 Craig Ashby
Mixed media on masonite.
7″ x 7″

If you’re paying close attention you will notice that this is the second image of Jennifer Lopez but it’s actually marked with a three. This is the first time in the series that the piece before this one was omitted. It was the only time a piece was ruined.

So I just left it out and focused my time on making this one exquisite. The top layer is a composite of photographs I took. It mainly consists of a photo of those giant Moravian/Metatron stars they put up for the holidays at the Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle. Overlaid on top of that is a photograph of a storefront window in Hell’s Kitchen that had been beautifully cracked.

The cracks in the empty space on the top left and above her right eye almost read as trompe l’oeil. And the stars read as broken prisms because of it all. The synergy between those images and the colors beneath is perfection. The colors in this one make it fight as my favorite painting in this whole series.

It’s every artist’s hope to do better in the next series or current series. But it is wonderful to look at a piece like this and know I couldn’t have done better. If I achieve better in the future, that would be great and it’s what I hope for but this will do for right now.