2D Studio Art - Painting & Drawing
My thesis project revolves around my consideration of nature as a way to examine loss, life, and how each decision I make determines my future and ultimate fate. With death serving as everyone’s inevitable fate, each choice we make in life creates a different timeline of possibilities in how we choose to live. Informed by my dreams, thoughts, and experiences of loss, my work seeks to symbolize my understanding of life, death, and the space in between.
The layering and repetition that occurs in my paintings, playing card drawings, and naturally in the hand cut Cypress knees serve as representations of the infinite possibilities in life, the hand of fate, and the anomalies in nature. Abstractions of the human-made, industrialized world in my paintings drawn from observations in my daily life and dreams allow me to see myself as a product of nature, evolving and learning from the humans that have come before me. Using canvases with oil paint and playing cards with gesso and markers, I am able to explore the organic changes that occur with the implication of the human hand. The nature of these materials allow for me to create texture, conceal and reveal, and build meaning in compositions. Repetitions of striking blues, warm yellows, and earthy green colors appear in my collection of work to express a range of tones and emotions regarding my human relationship with the environment. Cypress knees serve as an embodiment of the natural world, representing the human need to understand a deeper meaning in life. In them, we see as we wish.
I gain inspiration from taking hikes and walks to slow down and observe the natural world. Hand cutting Cypress knees serves as a meditative practice, their organic shapes revealing the deeper undergoing of the human psyche. They also represent fate through their mysterious nature, unable to be categorized or understood by ecologists and scientists. The meditative repetition of creating hundreds of playing cards allows me to think about how no circumstances will ever be identical, revealing the way decisions ultimately change the course of one’s life. The semi-transparent gesso covers and reveals the past lives of the playing cards, symbolizing how past occurrences effect my thinking now. I also turn to my journal of dreams and the memories that reading it evokes for inspiration in my paintings, noticing the environments and colors I see in my sleep.
The creation of paintings and drawings that explore repetition and industrial forms give me a space to come to terms with the infinite possibilities of fate, or how a situation could turn out in different ways. Colors and angular forms paired with organic forms create a parallelism in which the viewer can see themself as a part of the environment or a work of nature. In doing so, my viewers and I realize that as humans, we are not in opposition to the environment, but a working part of it.
“Altar”, oil on canvas, cypress knees, gesso, playing cards, prismacolor marker
“Altar” (detail), oil on canvas, cypress knees
“Altar” (detail), oil on canvas, cypress knees
“Altar” (detail), oil on canvas, cypress knees, gesso, playing cards, prismacolor marker
