09-MadgeLV4
©2009 Craig Ashby
Mixed media on masonite.
10″ x 7″

The fourth and final Madonna of the series. Oddly, no other set has four images. I will chalk it up to the excesses of the holiday season.

I love that bottom right corner and the far right cheek. It almost reads as burned or solarized. And of course the top photo composite layer really works for me. It’s a photograph I took of the glass atrium near the Citibank building in Long Island City, Queens. The blue and black window panes add a Deathstar quality to the painting.

This suffers all the same problems as the previous Madge. The bottom layer is oversanded and reduced to the white center area of the clay coated paper. Maybe I was a little conservative on the choice of the actual magazine layers in hopes for a more succinct and readable image. I think in the future I will err on the side of too much rather than too little.

In building the initial image, I remember how easily it came together. The super airbrushed image from her most recent Louis Vuitton campaign really struck me. Once I had the faces split and merged it was all about graphic intensity. Getting the rays that emanate from the cloud of eyes perfected was intense. I kept cutting them wrong, so the angles didn’t meet properly. It took forever. But once finished, I felt like I had learned a great deal.