I have always been fascinated with the paintings of Arshile Gorky. The way he applied paint, how certain lines can be delicate and certain shapes appear strong and independent, and the choice of color. Oh my gosh, the color. For my senior thesis, I wrote about him as an influence in those areas like application and composition, and I barely scratched the surface of allowing music to evoke associations to compose a painting, to allow the musical sounds to influence the marks I made. It's one sentence in my artist statement and that's it. I barely grasped it and scraped by when trying to articulate it to professors and peers. But how do you explain something you did intuitively?
During the helpful (albeit frustrating) conversations with my professor and mentor, I often ended with "I dunno why I chose this color or this shape, it just felt right for the painting." Or, "the painting told me to do it." It kind of opened a can of worms for me.
Now that I have graduated and moved to a much larger and busier city, I can feel my intentions changing. When I'm not working or writing reviews, I find myself missing my home: the mountains. (Okay, I'm a baby. I'm four hours away from home, but still. I miss it.) I'm not so interested in evoking the sensation of musical sounds--in compartmentalizing my paintings into line, shape, color, the end-- but remembering where I'm from, and "visiting" those places in my sketches. I am not comparing myself to Gorky (who can, really?), but I remember reading about how he left Armenia, his family, everything really. I've been looking at his Garden in Sochi series, how they were evoked by memories of a land that he certainly missed.
I think that I can make my work more personal and more meaningful by adding this element of remembering, recreating, and revisiting places I cannot be. There's also an element of "disappearing nature" that I want to get into. My collages/photomontages are beginning to aim themselves toward that point.
It's a work in progress.
During the helpful (albeit frustrating) conversations with my professor and mentor, I often ended with "I dunno why I chose this color or this shape, it just felt right for the painting." Or, "the painting told me to do it." It kind of opened a can of worms for me.
Now that I have graduated and moved to a much larger and busier city, I can feel my intentions changing. When I'm not working or writing reviews, I find myself missing my home: the mountains. (Okay, I'm a baby. I'm four hours away from home, but still. I miss it.) I'm not so interested in evoking the sensation of musical sounds--in compartmentalizing my paintings into line, shape, color, the end-- but remembering where I'm from, and "visiting" those places in my sketches. I am not comparing myself to Gorky (who can, really?), but I remember reading about how he left Armenia, his family, everything really. I've been looking at his Garden in Sochi series, how they were evoked by memories of a land that he certainly missed.
I think that I can make my work more personal and more meaningful by adding this element of remembering, recreating, and revisiting places I cannot be. There's also an element of "disappearing nature" that I want to get into. My collages/photomontages are beginning to aim themselves toward that point.
It's a work in progress.
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