Artist Statement

It’s intriguing how everyone is always alone, in an impenetrable place in their head, and yet it is an experience that everyone has. This is why I create art- I want to share my unique view of a life that everyone lives. The idea of unity amongst everyone in our shared life experiences, emotions, and ideas made me think that it would be interesting to investigate how different cultures have their own views on universal concepts, such as creation, human relations, life, and death. These are concepts that do not have an apparent explanation- what happens when you die?- and thus have traditionally warranted a mythological explanation. These cultural stories guided my work this year, and I started off illustrating traditional stories and putting my own take on them, which turned into me creating visual representations of the things that myths from all over have in common. By exploring this theme, I’ve been able to experiment with new techniques, form a preference for paint and graphite, and develop a more distinct style that incorporates my aesthetic inclination towards bright colors, curved shapes, and dark backgrounds. I’ve learned not to be shy about self-expression, whether that means subtle pencil drawings in the style of the Renaissance masters; strange, dreamy scenes like Dali or Ernst; or fluorescent splatters that emulate Daniel Richter. I’ve tried to mesh together my favorite styles and medias in experiments, to create something interesting while still overcoming my familiar barriers of working slowly and not having a great attention span. But I have still had achievements this year- I can see how cultures are interrelated through storytelling and how they relate to my own life, all while creating something that can filter through that isolation inside my head.

Death

-April-

This is the last piece I did, and it's interesting because conceptually it's my favorite, but aesthetically I'm unsure of it. The image came to me when my friend mentioned that she knew two sisters in art; one liked to draw skulls all the time, and the other always drew birds. After I had this image, I decided to use it to show a commonality in myths. Since myths were traditionally used to explain the unknown, and death is the ultimate unknown, all cultures have their own myths about death. Most cultures are interesting in that they depict death as being just like life, the only difference being that technically you're dead. In many cultures, the dead can come back and visit the living, and do practically anything that a living person can do. Some dead even do seemingly living-exclusive things like eat, play and keep posessions, since some ancient cultures would bury their dead with food, riches, toys and figurines, like Egyptian pharaohs or the Inca ice maiden. Anyways, I wanted to show this lack of change by having the dead birds feeding, something that typically only live organisms would do.

Like my "Microcosm" piece, I used this to experiment with my two medias of choice, paint and graphite. First, I sketched and shaded my birds, and then I painted over them with a watered down combination of white and a little pthalocyanine blue so that the shading would blend and show through. I used this for added contrast, since the birds are cool colors, very light and delicately shaded while the background is warm, dark, and just shaded with darks. The contrast makes it more interesting, but my favorite element in this piece is how the compostition is appealing and guides the viewer's eye around the piece.

An Old, Stinking Elephant

-April-

This is my favorite piece! I was inspired by a quote by Daniel Richter that went something like, 'Sometimes art is like a fresh breeze wafting around the corner, and sometimes it's like a stinking old elephant lumbering by.' (I've only ever seen it at the Daniel Richter exhibit at the DAM, so I don't know exactly what it was. A bit more awesome, but pretty much the same thing.) Anyways, I really liked this image, so I decided to paint it using watercolors and relate it to my theme via the story about the elephant in a dark room. I'm sure you know it, but I'll just refresh your memory- it's the story of an elephant in a part of the world that has never seen any elephants, and it is put in a dark room and people go in to 'see it.' Everyone goes in and feels a different part of it and thinks it's something else, like someone thinks its leg is a tree, someone else thinks its ear is a fan, yet another person thinks its back is a table. The point of this is that everyone has different ideas, even if they're about the same idea. I've heard this used to describe religions, but I decided to apply it to myths, since cultures have so many myths that describe the same thing but are all different, so I wanted to show the uniqueness of mythology but the universality of what it describes.

For this, I decided to make the elephant all sorts of random colors, since color is the element of art that appeals to me the most. To make it more interesting, I used the surrealistic technique of dripping a liquid down the page to make the different areas of color mingle together. Then, to make it more bold, I outlined it in black. This, doing the actual elephant, was the quick part and it only took me an afternoon. The background took a lot more consideration, since I couldn't leave it white but I didn't want it black, and I didn't want to overuse one color by putting it in the background. After a long while, the suggestion was made (by "La Llama en Llamas") that I should use zebra print in the background, which was really the best idea I could hope for. It wasn't all black or all white, or any of the colors, and it even added to the contrast and the idea, referring to the story by suggesting a question of whether it was an elephant or a zebra. In the end, the color, contrast, and texture of this piece made me really like it.

Self- Portrait

-April-

This was my first experiment with a style that smushes together all of the things I like; namely, bright colors and Daniel Richter's style. Before I did this, I was messing with photos in HP Image Zone (no, not Photoshop, I don't have it or know how to use it) and seeing what effects I could get. I thought all of the things I could do were interesting, so I decided to make a piece that used a ton of different effects. First, I had to take a picture of myself that worked, and then I edited it maybe twenty times over and printed out little pictures of all the edited photos. I used these as reference, in the end only using ten different styles, and had to stick with my little copies since my computer dies with all the full-size originals. (Each picture was a little smaller than the piece with the realistic eye, I would guess.) After that, I sketched out my picture onto the canvas, divided it into different shards, and colored each of them randomly, only decided how to do them as I did them, so I didn't have any idea what the final product would look like until I had it in front of me. This caused a few little problems but worked surprisingly well; I only had to repaint a couple areas. The biggest problem was actually the canvas- it was really big and also unstable, as I discovered after I had stapled the canvas to the frame. One of the wood pieces I used was warped, so it was constantly pulling out its staples and trying to mess up my canvas, but it hasn't succeeded yet. Anyways, after I painted myself, I painted the background black and splattered some of the colors I used onto it, so that it would be filled but not distracting from the piece. Overall, this piece was easy except for its large size, since painting it was pretty simplistic. Because of the size, though, it took a really long time.


The idea behind this was to show how storytelling, represented by the tape, helps to hold together all of the different facets of yourself. After all, no one is just the person they show to the world- maybe they're also a space cowboy or a pirate or a colonist on the moon. But without some way to express this imaginatively, such as storytelling, these parts of you would never be used and would die off. Thus, creative writing was created, both to entertain and to satisfy those different parts of yourself.

Portrait

-March-

Since graphite portraits are fun for me, I decided to work in a portrait of my best friend, since she fits in my theme as a storyteller since she writes novels. The hardest part of this was the background, since I didn't like it as well as the face, so I wasn't very compelled to do it. At first, I did more of a cottonwood-type tree in the background, but its shade and texture were too similar to the hair, so I decided to use more aspen-type trees so that there would be more contrast. My favorite part, and the part I spent the most time on, was the lips, since I really love her kind of gentle Mona Lisa smile. The best tool I had was my eraser, and I used it the most, especially on the face, hair, and the light splotches in the background that connotate foliage. However, I should have used more value, because I only used one pencil (and just a random one I found lying around, at that) so I had a limited range of darks. Another frustration was that her shirt and knees accumulated strange dark speckles that couldn't be erased, so I had to try to erase them and color darkly around them. Our best guess is that someone was spraying fixative for pastels or charcoal and got it on my picture, since I sit near the door. One of the more interesting parts was that I filled her eyes and rings with words, excerpts from one of her novels, to show how some people are able to see every part of the world as a story waiting to be told. In my first background, the trees were going to be covered in text as well, but I decided to be more subtle (or more lazy, if you choose to interpret it that way) and only have text in the eyes instead of over everything. As far as message goes, this isn't my best piece, but just as a portrait I really like it.

Mitochondrial Eve

-February-

Myths were created as a way of teaching explanations for things that no one was capable of explaining. This is why so many myths are about creation or death, two great unknowns that are hard to explain even now. However, with the rise of science, many myths lost footing and became obsolete and inapplicable to society, which is the idea that I used for this piece. To illustrate this idea, I decided to show Eve in the garden of Eden looking into a mirror. Instead of seeing herself, she sees the alternate version of the past- a prehistoric sea. It spills out of the mirror to show how scientific views commonly overpower mythological views, but it's left up to the viewer to decide if Eve will withstand the battery of the ocean, or whether its volume will be too great for her to survive.




For this, I had to mostly try to work with mistakes that I made, since you can't paint over watercolor, but I also had to try to use new techniques. Some techniques I used were doing lots of layering watercolor on the hair, doing blending on the sea animals by adding dark splotches while they were wet, using a rough sponge to create the texture on the vegetation behind Eve, and using masking to protect her skin from becoming green. However, some of the green leaked into the mirror, so I had to turn that into a "happy little mistake" by turning it into a bunch of seaweed, which actually accentuated the movement of the water and showed its force better. Another mistake I made was the coloration of the sea creature on the left; as you can see, part of the right one is underwater and paler where it's under the water, and the entirety of the left one was suuposed to be underwater. Unfortunately, I forgot to make it the right shade, but luckily it seems to read about as well. Overall, I think this turned out well, though if I could go back in time and do some things differently, I would use rubber cement to create light foam on the water spilling out and I would have painted Eve's legs on wet paper to get the wet-on-wet look, and I also would have made some parts of the painting darker to offset her hair.

Waiting

-February-

This is the second painting I did, expressing some people's views that fairy tales (in this culture, often featuring a damsel in distress who is rescued by a prince charming) are unrealistic and negatively affect young girls, making them think that they should just wait around to be saved instead of working hard to get the life they want. Although I don't share this idea, I wanted to illustrate it while playing with common symbols in storytelling. For example, I used the common symbol of a desert representing emptiness and a spiritual void and altered it to be a prairie, a semi-arid desert, instead. I also had to use lots of different painting techniques: I used blending on the sky so it would change from a light shade to a darker shade of blue, impasto on the clouds and gravel to give them a more interesting and realistic texture, many layers of watered-down acrylic paint to make the different shades of the prairie grass (which took the most time and patience out of everything), and a single strand of hair from a brush to make the deatails on the girl, like her eyes, eyebrows, and individual strands of hair. Overall, I like how this helped the color, value and texture in the piece and generated more visual interest.

Microcosm

-January-

This piece is an experiment with combining medias and using repetition. To do this, I first shaded everything with graphite and then tinted it using watercolor. The most difficult part of this was deciding on the composition, because I had to figure out how many parts, of what size, and put together in what way would look the best, and also where the different subjects should be put so that they look good but aren't too close to subjects in the other parts. Another hard part was consistency of color and texture, and even after many trials you can see that the orange slice on the left has more color saturation than the orange on the right. But in the end, I think that my message is apparent, since the repetition makes it clear that I'm showing the orange and the flowers as reflections on the moon. The connection to my theme is less easily guessed, but I used common mythological symbolism in the repeated round shape to show unity and the life cycle, and to hint at the idea that stories are reflections of life that are similar but not necessarily that true to it.

Essence

-December-

This was a turning point, because I decided to switch from creating pieces based off of stories and instead do pieces that show elements that myths and folk tales have in common. This first painting is called Essence beacause it is about how ancestry is the basis for myths and storytelling.

This piece is done in the style of Salvador Dali, so I had to reseach surrealism and common symbols in Dali's work. I borrowed some parts of his style in the sky, since his pieces often have a big, open blue sky; the horizon, as he likes to have a flat, empty horizon save for a random protrusion; and the eggs, since they were his personal symbol for birth and the new.

In this, you can see the staircase, representing life and ancestry, as it goes into a black hole, representing the oblivion that the future represents to many facets of culture. The faces in the stairs are screaming, because their stories may be lost. This is because I think that much of storytelling is a way of immortalizing people and the times that they lived in, and that is why ancestry the base of it. Also in the picture are eggs, representing the new generation; paper, which is blank and out-of-place to represent stories and how they represent people's lives but can only capture so much (like how big the stairs are, but how little green is dripping onto the paper); and the blue rose in place of the sun, showing how love guides the path of ancestry. After all, if there wasn't love, everyone would be either a hermit or a homicidal maniac, so the staircase of ancestry would actually just be a step before people died out. :P

The Girl Who Married Her Dog

-November-

This is a dry-point etching, and it's the second print that I did on Eskimo folk tales. This one was on the story of the girl who married her dog.

Once, there was a beautiful girl who refused to get married. Every time someone
proposed to her, she would turn them down, no matter how strong, brave, or
skilled they were. This frustrated her father, who was coming to believe that
she would never marry. In fact, she didn't even seem to like anyone except her
dog. One day, in frustration, her father yelled, 'Why don't you just marry your
dog!' The dog liked this idea, to say the least, and together he and the girl
ran off to an island in the bay. There, the girl had a litter of puppy-children,
and the dog would swim off every day to get food for them. However, the girl's
father liked his puppy-grandchildren and was frustrated that he couldn't see
them, so he killed the dog and started bringing them raw meat every day in his
kayak. One day, when the dog-children ran up to the kayak and ate all the meat
and were licking the blood off of the kayak, she cried, 'Eat him, my children!'
Her dog-children leaped up and killed her father and ate him. Then, the girl
took off her shoes and made them into boats for her children and said, 'One of
you will go to the South and become the red man. There you will wander and be
able to find enough to eat. One of you will go to the East and become the white
man. You will settle and grow your food. And the last one, you will go North-
there isn't much there, so eat whatever you can find.' And this was how the
Inuit people began.

This etching was difficult, because it's hard to make etchings since plexiglass is hard and the tools aren't sharp, but this is what I managed to come up with. Overall, line and value contributed to it the most, and I think that the composition was the strongest part since it added a lot of interest with one of the dog-children leaving its mother behind on the island. However, this would have been better if plexiglass wasn't so hard ir if the tools were sharper, since I was only able to get simple and minimalistic detail.

The Mother's Skull

-November-

This is one of two prints that I made based on Eskimo folk tales, and it's a linoleum block print. With this, I was trying to get contrast and texture, as well as an idea that it's in a cave and a distinct emotion from the bear and the boy. For the texture, I tried to have some variety by alternating between taking out big, deep chunks of linoleum (like on the bear's side and leg), flicking out small pieces (like the bear's muzzle or the boy's hood), and just scratching the linoleum (like on the boy's parka). However, some of the lighter scratching I did to create more variance in value didn't work, since they were too shallow and filled with ink. Another technique I used was to blend black and brown ink to give it a mottled look and to give the dark, earthy look of a cave, and to make it look more dramatic. After all, the boy is looking at his mother's skull:

One day, a pregnant woman was walking and collecting berries when it began
to rain so she sought shelter in a cave. Unfortunately, there was a she-bear in
the cave, who killed and ate the woman but decided to keep the baby boy in her
stomach and raise him as her own. As the boy grew up, his mother's skull
remained in the cave and became one of his favorite playthings. He would ask the
bear what it was, but she would say, 'Oh, that's just a dirty old skull. Don't
worry about it.' One day, the bear was out hunting, and the boy decided to
wander out on the ice with his skull. While he was walking, a team of hunters
spotted him. A shaman was with them, and he recognized the skull as that of the
woman who had gone missing all those years ago, so he chanted a spell to bring
the mother back to life. Together again, the mother and son went back with the
hunters to the village and lived happily ever after, but the she-bear cried
every night and never forgot about her son.

The Solid Cement Cadillac

-November-

Instead of using myths, I decided to use urban legends to inspire this piece. This particular legend was called the Solid Cement Cadillac, and it goes something like this:

A woman is married to a cement truck driver, who is a very jealous man. While
she stays at home, her husband often drives by in the middle of the day, on his
lunch break, to make sure she wasn't up to anything. One day, he sees a Cadillac
parked in his driveway and a man inside talking to his wife. Angry that his wife
was seeing some rich young man instead of staying home and doing housework, the
man backed his cement truck up to the house, filled the other man's Cadillac
with cement, and drove off. When he came home after work, he caustically asked
his wife how her day was. Crying, she responded, 'It was just awful! I bought
you a brand new Cadillac as a surprise present, but when I was inside signing
the forms some jerk filled it with cement!'

Anyways, I was just playing with colored pencil and combined image drawings, but this turned out kind of horribly, mostly because I think it has a poor composition and because I used random colors that happened to look bad together. Maybe some day I'll redo it with a different composition and with an actual color scheme.

Drink me!

-November-

I did this piece to show how some stories, even though they aren't intended to be myths, become culturally significant stories. My inspiration for this was Alice in Wonderland, which started out as just a novel but became a part of American culture. I used this as a media experiment to use contrast, texture and composition to explore ink and cross-hatching. With this, I drew a mushroom I found, which was really tiny, from a different point of view like how Alice would have seen the world when she became tiny.

Wanted to Get Lost

-November-


For this piece, I was doing my own interpretation of Hansel and Gretel. I used oil pastel, which didn't work out very well because oil pastel dries after a while and so you cant make any corrections. I didn't know this until I did this piece, so the face has some nasty splotches where I tried to go back and correct it. Another annoying thing is that oil pastel attracts stuff, so little pieces of different colored pastel gets stuck to it; luckily, though, you can't tell unless you look more closely. Overall, I tried to use the dark, hot color scheme to indicate that Hansel and Gretel's surroundings were malignant nad evil, while making them brighter to provide contrast and draw the viewer's eye to their faces, especially Gretel's eyes, since they don't adhere to the color scheme. Some techniques I used in this were smearing the oil pastel, as I did with the background and the shirts, and doing layers of oil pastel starting with light colors and then adding dark and scraping off parts of the dark layers to get texture, like in the hair and eyes.

The idea for this piece was to do a portrait (with Jourdan as my model) while showing another view of Hansel and Gretel. This fairy tale was written to admonish the hardships of medeival life, when many families couldn't get by, much less take care of children, so sometimes families would leave their children in the woods to die. In my version, instead of being the victims of their times, Hansel and Gretel wanted to get lost, realizing that their world was not where they wanted to be living and deciding to take a risk and lead their own lives.

The Cow-Tail Switch

-October-

This was my first attempt at acrylic painting since my 8th grade personal project, and I was basing it off of an African folk tale, in which there is a man, a great hunter with many children, who goes off into the woods one day and is never seen again. His family pretends that nothing happens and goes on as usual until his baby son is born. When his son is old enough to talk, he asks his siblings where his father is, and they decide to go out and find their father. They go out into the woods and after a short while, they find their father's skeleton, where he was attacked by a leopard. One of them knows how to put his bones back together, another knows how to sing flesh back onto the bones, and et cetera. Together, the hunter's children bring him back to life, and lead him back to the village. Everyone is excited about his return, and there is a huge party. The hunter slaughters his best cow for this ceremony, and makes its tail into a magnificent switch, the most amazing thing anyone had ever seen. At the celebration, everone asked to touch the switch, but the hunter wouldn't let them. At the very end, he said that he would give the switch to the child who had done the most to bring him back to life. All of his children rushed forward to say how important their role had been, but their father stopped each of them. After all of his children had bickered over who deserved the switch the most, the hunter reached down and gave the switch to his baby son, who hadn't even said anything, for he was the one who had remembered the hunter. And, as he said, 'No one is truly dead until they are forgotten.'

In this piece, I was using the switch to represent life, by using color, shape and contrast. All of these together showed the difference between life and death: life was free, loose, and made up of curvy shapes while death was represented with geometric shapes; life was made out of hot colors and death of cold colors; and life was bright against death's dark background. For this, I had to use different techniques, especially to get the different textures in the piece. In the background, I used masking to get the different shapes and impasto to color them. On the switch, I got the scribbly texture by rolling a piece of thread in paint and then pressing it to the canvas. Overall, though, this isn't a very exciting piece.

Pandora

-September-

This is the first real piece that I did this year. We had to incorperate an object we'd been drawing over the summer into a black and white still life. I did this in charcoal to have lots of value nad contrast, and I decided to make it my own interpretation of the story of Pandora's Box. In this case, I had the teapot representing the box and the marbles and fabric spilling out of it representing the ills that the box released on the world. In the end, I decided that this would just be a media experiment, and that although charcoal is fast and easy to blend, I didn't want to use it again because it gets strange textures and smudges easily.

Buffalos

-August-

This was a negative space project (actually, this is a re-do of the original) that I did in watercolor. Since this was early in the year, I didn't have any meaning behind it besides the disappearance of bison in North America.