Line Drawings Artist Statement
Moving to New York City alone was a nerve racking journey for me. I have never been away from my family for long, the longest being a month or so, and never expected adjusting to the city to be so difficult. When thinking about what to base my line drawings on I wanted to make something relating back to my family. I thought of the Life360 app that my family uses to track each other's whereabouts in case someone is in trouble. I wanted to use the tracking info in the Life360 app and depict how close my family is even though we’re miles apart. I looked at all of our past trips to see where and when we traveled. From this information I decided to graph each of our trips in a given time frame.
My system became based on line weight and direction of travel for each family member. My father was assigned the thickest line weight, my mother a medium line weight, I would be a thin line, and my sister would be a double thin line. From this I graphed my family’s movement at a given time on a daily basis. I would start from a corner and then graph each turn a family member would take in one given hour. This often resulted in my father, mother, and sister’s lines to be in one area while mine was on the opposite side of the page. These ten drawings brought me to feel closer to my family while I am halfway across the country. Being able to spend this time to “research” my family, I was able to feel more connected to them through this project.
News : Deconstructing/Reconstructing Artist Statement
In the age of technology, going out and buying a newspaper seems so alien. To spend the last month going out to collect newspapers from paper stands and delis was so odd for me because I have only ever received newspapers delivered to my house. Being able to spend time actually dissecting and reading newspapers was a very interesting and new experience for me. While being heavily inspired by Laura Fields’ series, Front Pages with Pictures of Women : The New York Times, I realized how much color plays a part in how we interpret news, specifically front pages of newspapers. Laura Fields tends to focus on recreating color and patterns from the front page spread’s main photo. I really resonated with the concept from drawing information from the main image of the cover and wanted to paint a half spread of the color that jumped out to me first from every front page. I mixed a base of four colors: red, yellow, green, and blue, with white and black to recreate these colors. By mixing these colors straight on the page and not buying paint matching these colors in the photos directly, I wanted to mimic the way our minds take time to process and filter information when reading the newspaper.
Once I had completed the project I realized that oftentimes the most striking colors in these photographs can be very powerful to the story itself. For example, the piece covering the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is overpowered by the mournful dark gray that I coated the back side of the newspaper spread with. I also noticed that sometimes we can recognize biases the NYT has with the piece covering the first presidential debate of the 2020 election cycle. The color that stood out to me the most was this deep blue which could reveal the NYT’s more liberal bias towards politics. What I thought was most interesting was that when shown all together, the newspaper’s main colors reflected the printing colors, CMYK: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.
Artist Workshop : Glendalys Medina
When viewing and discussing Glendalys Medina’s work, I was most captivated by her sense of individuality and originality. I really resonated with her way of coming up with concepts for her work, especially how she takes from her past experiences to create new ideas. My favorite part of her talk was seeing how she deconstructed the boombox and has it’s motif throughout her artwork.
When creating my piece in class, I wanted to draw from a warm memory of my family. I chose three objects that I use on a daily basis: a hairclip, airpods, and my chapstick. When coloring this piece I was really focused on the concept of warmth. Red is a very special color in my family so I wanted to bring in colors that were similar. This resulted in a flower looking pattern that seemed balanced on the center circle.
Creating my shapes and patterns project, I was heavily inspired by Medina’s boombox project and her use of graffiti. I decided to choose shapes of graffiti that are often overlooked in everyday life. I chose shapes that had at least one “circle” in the shape because I wanted to create patterns that had life. In pattern one I decided to manipulate a letter “P” into looking like two birds, in pattern two I made a graffiti tag into little monsters, and in pattern three I decided to take a letter “B” and transform it into a small crab.
3D Project : Conflict
When learning how to use Metashape Pro, I was very excited to be able to finally learn how to render 3D shapes and objects. And with the prompt of conflict I immediately thought of trying to render a razor. I wanted to render a razor because I've always had an inner conflict about shaving. In my first test run I had a pink razor that was partially clear. This test run did not even produce a render due to the program not being able to recognize any tie points. I then decided to paint the razor and add white splotches so that the program could recognize more tie points and therefore create a render. This was unsuccessful. I realized that the program could not render the razor because the razor was so symmetrical.
Colors
Many of my personal images are monochromatic. This is because I tend to shoot on black and white film, but even in my digital work, the images I produce tend to be overwhelmingly one tone. In this image, I used the cyanotype process on a piece of painted wood. This process prints the image in a blue hue due to a chemical reaction that happens between fer- ric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide. This tone of blue is then washed with a hydrochloric acid to create even richer tones. With this image I decided that this color blue would add a layer of emotion. Blue is often associated with inspiration and sadness which are the emotions I wanted my model to convey.