One More Painting Featuring White Dress

Last weekend was a fulfilling weekend.  I was able to wrap up two paintings I'd been working on for months.  I discussed the first one - White Dresses a couple days earlier and today, and now I am going to discuss my White Dress with Birds briefly. 

For this painting, the white dress was not in the original plan.  I was in the process of working on paintings with portals and this painting, at its half-finished stage, felt very empty and devoid of meaning and life.  While juggling between works, I was suddenly hit with the idea of incorporating a white dress into this one.  The dress should be airy yet dominant, unlike that in the White Dress I completed in 2005, or the White Dresses with featured a multitude of floating dresses.  I also used bold graphite outline to set the boundaries of windows and the grids on the dress, to emphasis the contrast and texture. 

The white dress was hanging freely yet being confined in the narrow interior; the curtains were billowing but flew inwards; the birds on the dress were confined in their little cell, however pretty.  The painting thus achieved a sense of a deliberate incoherence and clashes, in a subtle and nonviolent way, and enigmatic too.


White Dress with Birds
Oil on Canvas
20" x 24"
Completed in 2011

You can see other paintings I'd done with the motif of white dress below:


White Dresses
Oil on Canvas
22" x 28"
Completed in 2011


White Dress
Oil on Canvas
20" x 16"
Completed in 2005