ARTWORK COMMENTARY: OPERA FIGHT

Date: March 2022

Dimensions: 10"x8"

Son Lux is an American experimentalist band that produced the soundtrack for the movie Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. This poster is for the song Opera Fight.

I have loved and adored this movie ever since it came out. I think it perfectly encompasses the mother-daughter relationship, the immigrant-child experience, the American Dream, bringing a twist on nihilism that wrecked me since I first watched it. If I could, I would devote each and every artwork I make to this movie. It truly changed the way I thought about the world around me.

I chose an overall warm temperature palette in order to highlight the fast pace and the intensity of the music, with an overall cool foreground to push it from the back. I also used yellow-oranges in the middle, fading out to orange and red-violet, creating a luminous effect and highlighting the figure. Over it is text that stretches down the piece, employing the Bezold effect, getting lighter in value as it goes into the darker portion of the background and getting duller as it goes into the yellow-orange center.

The Opera crown on the main figure is indigo because it symbolizes a deep sincerity and keeping of tradition, also colors of wisdom and self-mastery as she learns the lesson of “being kind because nothing matters” throughout the movie, a color that appears with a tint of yellow-orange on the googly eye on her head, symbolizing her gain of wisdom and a hope for the future. The color also appears on the plum blossoms on her shawl, the plum blossoms representing resilience and hope. Phoenixes adorn her dress as well, being a symbol for rebirth and new beginnings. I made it green to both symbolize growth and to make the color subjective. The figure on the bottom does not have this color, as she employs a collar with tear shapes and a head-jewel of a tone of blue-gray, symbolizing her feelings of separation from reality and her sadness of feeling small against the grand scheme of the universe. Both have overall objective colors for their hair and their skin tone.

The planar form is represented in the glass shards on the bottom, as they are largely geometric with a side shadow. Volumetric form appears in the braid-bagel of the figure on the bottom, the googly eye, and the fuzzy balls on the figure on top.