A Brief History of My Visual Ideas

Since a young age I have been inclined to express myself through visual means. My relationship with art has been inconsistent over the years but has been generally consuming when I have a project that I want to accomplish. The following is a chopped history of my art since age 4.

I express the desire to be an artist in this self portrait I drew in preschool. Below it is another drawing from that time of a girl that has no feet.

Self Portrait of an Artist, 1998

Girl who Lost her Feet, 1998

This is my first website as a visual artist circa 2001 My dad made this for me and I forgot about it until a year ago. At the time, at age 7, I was very inspired by young women and their idealized roles as mermaids and cheerleaders. I also started taking my first art lessons at this time, where I learned to draw and paint still lifes.

In 5th grade history class (which I think was 2006) I started making model replicas for extra credit on research projects. This is a  replica I made of the Trojan Horse. It had toy soldiers that came out of its torso on a string and moved on wheels.

Trojan Horse, 2006

In 2010 I took my first oil painting class at my high school and learned the method of glazing. This is my first oil painting and it is drawn from a vulture photo that my art teacher had in his office. He was really into safari animals and I really liked this bird for how distorted its body seemed.

Vulture, 2010

This is a collage I started to make in 2011 out of the Camel cigarettes packaging. The figure is from a Lucky Strike ad that was in a 1920s Vogue Magazine. I never finished it but was planning on incorporating a cut out of the obituary section.  Around this time I became very interested in expressing more conceptual and societal ideas in my art such as the measures that women go to beautify themselves, a growing reliance on technology, and the psychology behind consumerism.  

Unfinished Collage, 2011

These are some of my first figure drawings from the summer of 2011. 

Figure Drawing, 2011

Figure Drawings on the Floor, 2011

In the Fall of 2013 I took my first sculpture class. Using power tools was a new and exhilarating experience for me because it gave me more power and abilities yet gave me less physical control while creating. I started to think a lot about materials and their physical qualities. For the piece below I was interested in creating fluidity and motion in a material as stiff and dull as wood.

Anemone, 2013

Below it is a snail pattern that I drew around the same time. I'm really fascinated by reoccurring patterns in nature such as fractals and spirals, and wanted to create a pattern containing this type of pattern. 

Hail the Snail, 2013

This term I'm excited to be further pursuing sculpture as well as developing skills and methodology as a film maker and photographer. Interests in absurdism, mundanity, human potential, natural beauty and decay, subcultures and anthropology might be themes in my future work but I have little insight about where unfamiliar tools and materials will take me. For a while now I have had a large interest in the effect that digital media, especially social networking has on individuality, relationships, loneliness, creativity, attention span and culture and I hope to explore these concepts through digital media and through my blog. 

"All media are extensions of some human faculty--psychic or physical"-Marchall McLuhan (The Medium is the Massage)

"the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that is indifferent to our wishes--a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts; a world of resistance--with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self"-Jonathan Franzen (Further Away)