Polyester Pinch

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Original painting (January 2022) 
 
Oil on canvas 
 
30 x 40 inches 
 
For this piece, I used a reference photo of Olivia Newton-John taken during the Grease release party at Studio 54. In America, the 1970s were an era of extreme decadence where the boundaries of fashion, music, sex, dancing, and drugs were being pushed to their limitations; Studio 54 was a short-lived representation of that excessive era. After a lot of consideration, I felt that painting any sort of background would distract from the subject. Additionally, the strong visual contrast between the white background and the subject is reminiscent of how we experience a memory or flashback, where only a piece of the entire image remains accessible to our conscious minds.