Artist Statement

I grew up an introvert in an extroverted society. My refuge from big crowds or excessive small talk was my hobbies. I played lots of sports and I had friends, but when I went home after school and practices you would not find me texting a plethora of people or going out to parties. You’d find me stuck at my art desk, headphones in, dead to the world. Or you’d find me on the couch in the rarely-travelled living room of my house, buried in three blankets and nose-deep in a book. I learned how to sew, write, knit, do crosswords and Sudoku, read Morse code, play guitar, put together puzzles, anything that was interesting and didn’t involve other people. Nothing was more addicting to me than art and reading. Those two put me on a different planet where I am both fully absorbed in the activity and perfectly challenged and entertained. When I am violently ripped out of those worlds to do mundane things like eat and go to class, I only think about the next time I can go back. I don’t make art to be political, or to make a grand statement about society or disgust the viewer, as the style seems to be these days. I make art selfishly, for my own sanity and therapy, and it is just a pleasant side effect when others enjoy what I create.

One of our assignments this semester was to alter a book in some way. Of course I took this as free reign to slap paint all over the pages of a book and hope it looked good. To make the piece I looked through the book I had chosen and outlined the strong descriptive sentences I liked. Then I went through with gouache and painted the first thing that came to my mind when reading those phrases. Gouache is a paint opaque enough to hide or blur the rest of the words on the page, so all the viewer can see is my painting and the phrase I left uncovered. I stayed pretty literal; on one page I painted a glass of lemonade behind the phrase "Have some lemonade." I loved how it turned out, and it was a lot of fun to make because it combined my love for art and my love for reading in one activity. For my final project I decided to expand the original idea. I found visually inspiring phrases on different pages from magazines, art books, and fiction books and tore them out. I used the same process as before of painting over all other words with whatever image was strongest in my head. The result is a series of paintings, all around the size of a book or a large magazine, which portray somewhat dream-like visuals around a highlighted sentence. In my favorite piece of the series I used the phrase "Imagine the sun is a giant florescent bulb", and I painted a solar system with planets revolving around a bright lightbulb. This final series shows the real, incredible process of reading, where our minds create such rich imagery simply by looking at black marks on a white page.