Finding my Vision?

Do you feel that you’ve developed a vision for your art through the work you’ve made this semester?

I would not say that I have developed my vision for my art for the rest of my life, but I have identified a couple of themes that are interesting to me and that I would like to explore further. I really enjoy texture in things from nature—trees, clouds, water, etc., and I learned this when I was drawing setting for my raccoon in the first narrative drawing. In next couple assignments I did more strict studies on trees and clouds, but I felt they were boring. I wanted to bring back more of a quality that enabled an interaction between the drawing and the audience, which I felt my raccoon drawing had (even if it wasn’t immediately obvious). So I decided to keep exploring the textures of clouds but reintroduce another element, which ended up being an airplane wing. For this drawing, the placement of the wing was really important to me; I wanted whoever was viewing it to feel they were looking out the airplane window and thus indirectly interacting with the setting. I liked this idea—placing a single machine against the backdrop of a single natural setting and position it such that the audience would be drawn into the conversation between the two. Thus for my final drawing I picked out a strange angle to view the flying hull of a catamaran (and took the person sailing it out of the photo) and placed it against a partly cloudy sky.

What are you saying with your drawings after 14 weeks of work?

I don’t feel like I have fully explored the potential depth of things that I could say with my drawings. I don’t really know what I want to say, but I do know I that find the simple harmonious interaction between nature and man an interesting subject to explore, and I think I want to continue with that to see what deeper meanings it might lead me to.

What is important to you as an artist? Have you changed as an artist?

I use art mainly as a way to ground myself and relax, so it is important to me that what I make is also at least sort of relaxing and grounding. It seems I have settled more firmly into my style of drawing that started last spring in beginning drawing—a more pastel, subdued combination of values that gives a romanticized tint to whatever I’m drawing.