Below is a series of work I completed in Spring of 2022 as my capstone project for graduation. It is a 10 piece series for a gallery show held within a campus gallery in a group show with two other students. Work on the show included research, iterative sketching, creating the work, marketing, showcard designs, food catering, gallery setup, lighting setup/maintenance, framing, hosting opening reception, gallery takedown, and cleanup. The time frame from inception in mid-February until the show from April 24-28, 2022. At the very end will be the artist statement hung beside the works within the gallery at the time of the work's showing.
One last thing, Enjoy!
Cruising
2022
Watercolor, Gesso, and Pen
(20"x26")
Lurk
2022
Watercolor
(20"x26")
Unknown Ruins
2022
Watercolor
(28" x20")
Adult Female in Prospective Environment
2022
Watercolor and Gesso
(6'x4')
Juvenile Merman, approx. 16 yrs.
2022
Watercolor, Ink, and Gesso
(6'x4')
Harvest
2022
Watercolor
(20"x26")
Battle in the Kelps
2022
Watercolor and Gesso
(1'4.5"x3'0.5")
The Conference
2022
Watercolor
(11"x13")
Homo sapien
2022
Pen and Ink
(12"x10")
Oceanirex humanus
2022
Pen and Ink
(12"x10")
Artist's Statement:
My current works are a series of surreal landscapes, portraiture, and genre art that depict a fantasy world and society. My work depicts an underwater world, like the mythical city of Atlantis in style and origin. I work in watercolors and ink to portray works through the eyes of a modern-day Naturalist studying these beings.
This show is spurred by personal interests to tie together concept art and fine art into one. To combine “fun” art with “professional” art makes compelling art. My goal is to become a concept artist and finding ways to practice these skills now while being a student is important. The conceptions of the environments and characters are designed through concept art practices, but the renderings are that of fine art.
Science and the supernatural have always gone together. Mythos has been used to explain and make tangible dangers of life: the monsters in the forests that devour children or sirens who can sing a man to peril. Sometimes, reality intertwines with fantasy and redefines what we know. For example, the discovery of dragons (dinosaurs) or the kraken (the colossal squid). I want to use this duality to revive historical mythology into our modern world.
Growing up, I was surrounded by paleontology, archaeology, and anthropology as this was my mother's career. It spurred my urge to learn about the world and I fantasized about these lost realms. Alongside this, I grew up on fantasy media, like Disney, Dinotopia, Lord of the Rings, and more. These imaginative scopes coincided heavily with their “real” contemporaries by using our “reality” to elevate their “fantasy.” The real and imaginative tinged my worldview since then.
Now, I have taken to designing my own worlds. Through ‘alien’ and unreal societies, the ‘human experience’ can be taken to a new form. It allows the viewer to see that despite visual differences, these differences are not big in terms of what it means to live and exist.
Within our human history, discovering other beings and the frission of alternate existences are a large part of our culture. We catalogue and mark every existence and quantify it down to words on paper from historical documents to present day biology.
My work could be interpreted as a social critique and a philosophical question about conscious existence. The novelty of “discovering” life within the world, a comparable one to our own existence; and the innate feeling of uncanny valley, freak show idealization, and the dehumanization of "the other.” The philosophical side can be posed in the question of where we draw the line of “human” versus “non-human.” Is it the level of intelligence, appearance, or is it consciousness? Dolphins are compared to having human-like intelligence and are considered to be our ocean equivalents. However, they are only “human-like,” and we are not “dolphin-like.” We consider ourselves the metric to determine whether a species is intelligent or not. The mermaids in my work have their anatomy and colors based around dolphins. I want to ask: if they are humanized more, will our view of their existence be raised higher, or will it still be just that of an animal, a tag we forget to place on ourselves.
Starting as a project for my Drawing: Series class, Oceani has been a project of passion. A chance for me to practice my narrative drawing skills has grown into a meditation on nonlinear storytelling. I wanted to gain practice in making characters and stories that were interdependent but could stand by themselves as single images. Employing through means we are familiar with; I present the unfamiliar. I splice real-world science with fantasy to give the foundation for my own pseudoscience. This gives my series an open window to another world in which these creatures exist and live. Through showing daily life, dangers, tools and artifacts, and architecture, I want to give a new perspective on life and how we view the “other.”
This show is spurred by personal interests to tie together concept art and fine art into one. To combine “fun” art with “professional” art makes compelling art. My goal is to become a concept artist and finding ways to practice these skills now while being a student is important. The conceptions of the environments and characters are designed through concept art practices, but the renderings are that of fine art.
Science and the supernatural have always gone together. Mythos has been used to explain and make tangible dangers of life: the monsters in the forests that devour children or sirens who can sing a man to peril. Sometimes, reality intertwines with fantasy and redefines what we know. For example, the discovery of dragons (dinosaurs) or the kraken (the colossal squid). I want to use this duality to revive historical mythology into our modern world.
Growing up, I was surrounded by paleontology, archaeology, and anthropology as this was my mother's career. It spurred my urge to learn about the world and I fantasized about these lost realms. Alongside this, I grew up on fantasy media, like Disney, Dinotopia, Lord of the Rings, and more. These imaginative scopes coincided heavily with their “real” contemporaries by using our “reality” to elevate their “fantasy.” The real and imaginative tinged my worldview since then.
Now, I have taken to designing my own worlds. Through ‘alien’ and unreal societies, the ‘human experience’ can be taken to a new form. It allows the viewer to see that despite visual differences, these differences are not big in terms of what it means to live and exist.
Within our human history, discovering other beings and the frission of alternate existences are a large part of our culture. We catalogue and mark every existence and quantify it down to words on paper from historical documents to present day biology.
My work could be interpreted as a social critique and a philosophical question about conscious existence. The novelty of “discovering” life within the world, a comparable one to our own existence; and the innate feeling of uncanny valley, freak show idealization, and the dehumanization of "the other.” The philosophical side can be posed in the question of where we draw the line of “human” versus “non-human.” Is it the level of intelligence, appearance, or is it consciousness? Dolphins are compared to having human-like intelligence and are considered to be our ocean equivalents. However, they are only “human-like,” and we are not “dolphin-like.” We consider ourselves the metric to determine whether a species is intelligent or not. The mermaids in my work have their anatomy and colors based around dolphins. I want to ask: if they are humanized more, will our view of their existence be raised higher, or will it still be just that of an animal, a tag we forget to place on ourselves.
Starting as a project for my Drawing: Series class, Oceani has been a project of passion. A chance for me to practice my narrative drawing skills has grown into a meditation on nonlinear storytelling. I wanted to gain practice in making characters and stories that were interdependent but could stand by themselves as single images. Employing through means we are familiar with; I present the unfamiliar. I splice real-world science with fantasy to give the foundation for my own pseudoscience. This gives my series an open window to another world in which these creatures exist and live. Through showing daily life, dangers, tools and artifacts, and architecture, I want to give a new perspective on life and how we view the “other.”
