Artist Statement SL
Art to my eyes is the music to my ears; being talents, practices, and passions of mine, visual arts and music are the biggest factors in my life. The progression of critical thinking in my person has immensely grown over the years from none at all as a child, to above average throughout schooling, and then beyond to insightful with the help of my schools’ music programs. Having learnt three instruments as a child and then learning four more, mastering two, with the guidance of professors, music has opened up not only a larger spectrum of my self-expression, but is has shaped my perspective of human emotion and empathy.
As an artist, my perspective, passions, and emotions are what shape my work. In my present life, the biggest concept shared by those three components is music; ergo it has become my IB theme. Although still hazy and unfocused to an extent, I explore my theme through: lyrical emotion, music theory, memories, experiences, instruments, and most importantly the release of contentment through self-expression. To express emotion in music is to express through visual art, musicality and composition are entirely personal. The stronger I feel, the more moving my art becomes.
Audial elements of musical sound can naturally become the shape, color, and overall substance of a painting or drawing. My brain can even turn the interpretation of sound waves into color, defined as synthesia. In future works, I plan to use this to explore abstraction representationally and non-representationally. This will appear as both painted textures and as aspect of subjects in my work.
Thus far, I have sought to explore my theme through portraiture and compositions featuring singular subject forms. Because of this, my work is quite self- explanatory and compositionally generic. However, I plan to attempt formulating pieces with other ideas incorporated into them. I would love to explore emotional isolation through landscape, painting the places that I take myself to when I get lost in impassioned contention. Symphonies will create natural settings such as forests, plains, mountains, and integrations of such as visual places that represent certain songs. To me, natural views are eye- candy and the thought of personal isolation in beautiful places is a fantasy. Intertwining this into my theme and work is ideal. When I think about what I would be doing in the future, artist comes to mind, musician as well; the nature- adorning side of me has a foothold as well, but another side of me shouts “interior design”. Home is the most beloved place in my introverted world, and designing homely spaces and places to feel as home to all is a concept that has attracted me for many years. With the desire to create intricate drawings and the love of interior design, the idea of creating one, two, and three point perspectives has been a desired plane of exploration for my work as well. As I type this, I think that I want to create a drawn perspective with multiple 3D looking planes that has an image defining the 2D plane of the paper as well; I could attempt creating an illusion where the piece is a space bound inward towards vanishing points, but arrange room design and objects to create musical symbols, perhaps into the negative space, and with it, create a subtle plane defining the surface of the page. This would use the component of implied depth to confuse the viewer into looking past a hidden image.
Compositional variables aren’t the only factors that I would like to expand my experience with; I should be reaching out to different mediums as well. Having stayed within a circle of watercolor and ink, I feel obliged to dive back into colored pencil, acrylic, oil pastels, and graphite, or even seek new fields such as oil paints, scratch board, 3D media, photography, and perhaps even digital media.
I feel like I work best planning as I go, but I plan to start with compositional landscape and perspective pieces first, and then explore diverse media, but perhaps I will explore both at the same time, we will see.
Being halfway through my SL year, I look forward to what IB Art will bring me in the future and into HL year. My interests may shift and my passions shouldn’t falter, but both myself and my work will undoubtedly change, however, what I have done and will be doing now shall stay the same. Perhaps my music will give me insight to a more broadened horizon, but I think my perspective on what music is should remain. In contrast with my musical journey, I still continue to ask myself what is art, and what does it mean to me? Perhaps using a theme with something that I do understand will lead to a better understanding.