Throughout my entire experience with art, I have gone through my own personal journey, and have come out with a new understanding of what exactly art is and what it should mean to myself and others. When I started this 2 year journey with art, I had barely ever even created something that could resemble artwork. I was brand new to every artistic term and concept that came at me such as warm colors, cool colors, negative space, positive space, monochromatic, abstract, impressionism and contemporary art forms. I was completely lost and didn’t know how I could understand any of it, much less actually create decent artwork. I had a lot of doubt in my abilities and ideas, I could come up with ideas, but I could almost never fully realise and bring them out the way I wanted them to be. Then throughout the entire process of making every piece; I began to understand what exactly art was for. Not just to look pretty and create feelings for others, but to also make myself think of what exactly I had done and why I did it.
The first piece I want viewers to see will be my surrealist piece What Makes What. Starting the exhibition with one of my first artworks; it being the first time I’ve ever heard of surrealism, and the first time I’ve ever used new mediums of art like prismacolor, ink and charcoal. Though not one of my best pieces in terms of technical skill, it does set up my journey of how I changed my view of art. The next piece No Fear, was my first block printmaking piece; with it I tried to emphasize more on how to texture with drawn and etched images. After that I began to feel more encouraged to do bigger and more complex pieces. Solo is the next piece, where I pulled inspiration from previous artworks with a new medium charcoal, and I myself felt like it was a disappointment due to it not perfectly capturing the image I had imagined. After that I doubt and fear began to return, and led me to my next piece Help. In this piece I was experiencing a sense that I wasn’t a good enough artist, and I might never be, but the end product really caught me by surprise and made me feel something else. The next three pieces Walk Through the Forest, Back Home, and Fire Across; were new attempts in landscape art with different mediums. First with just simple black and white acrylic, then capturing the texture of a landscape with calligraphy, and finally trying to instil emotions blending and mixing colors. The next piece, Holiday feelings was to try and make a realistic still life to see how my abilities have progressed, and using previously unknown terms such as shadow, value and color layers. With Reverse Moon Light, I began to want to bring back old ideas and concepts back into my artwork. Using the idea of Solo and casting a reversal on that same idea with the landscape. The final piece that the viewer should see is What Makes Me, from the concept of the 5 basic shapes to detail a person’s personality. It captures personality and journey pretty well; a whole mess of ideas and attempts that may or may not work.
The exhibition should show the viewer exactly what I am, a random set of ideas trying to find the meaning behind everything. What I am trying to show is my interpretation of what art is and how it should mean just as much to me as the viewer. I feel like art doesn’t really have to be pretty, or even make sense; it could instill feeling in someone else or it couldn’t. What should really matter to the artist is that they created it. It might draw inspiration from others or it could be something completely new and unfamiliar to them. Every piece can be linked to other concepts and ideas, but the difference between them is that I made them with my own hands and that's what it’s really about; that it's your work and your effort no one else's.
