Okay, the assignment in class was to choose a favorite modern artist. I chose Baz Luhrmann, as I love his use of color and composition in his films, especially in Moulin Rouge. I also happen to have always been very interested in the real Moulin Rouge and French history, particularly in Paris between the 17th and 20th centuries. Anyway, I researched this a LOT, and did all I could to understand the true stories behind the brothels and dance halls in Paris, especially at the Moulin Rouge. According to a lot of references, the movie "Moulin Rouge!" portrays it fairly well, minus all the aesthetic beauty, song and dance numbers, and fairy tale love. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was one of the pioneering artists of the Bohemian Revolution, in which both the movie and the height of the Moulin Rouge takes place. I've admired his posters and paintings for some time now, so I brought inspiration from both Baz's and Toulouse-Lautrec's styles, and mixing it with my own (and neither were very far off from what I've developed up to now).

The piece is about the transition from the mundane middle Bourgousie (I have no idea if I spelled that right) class in Paris into the exciting and wild life that the Moulin Rouge offered with its circus-like enviornment filled with dancing girls whose flexibility mirrored their morals, as well as the use of mind-altering drugs like Opium and the infamous drink Absinthe (banned in the early 1900's for it's side effects on the brain). The piece may not look balanced or have composition (both of which aspects I'm very careful about in my works) because the essence of it is in the transition.

In creating this, I used mainly chalk pastel (wet and dry techniques) along with the help of gouache, acrylic, and charcoal. The board is a 10" x 45" (roughly) coldpress watercolor board. I can't really count the hours spent on this, though it would've been much more if I hadn't procrastinated, because there was a lot more I wanted to do (and may fix when I get the piece back).

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