My artwork explores themes of nature and nostalgia through the use of impressionistic painting styles, unity, and movement. By creating these types of artworks, my goal is to bring similar emotions of light carefreeness to viewers because happy, content emotions inspire people in positive ways. While my goals involve positively inspiring and pleasing others, my most important aspiration is to evoke peaceful emotions inside my own mind; when I’m in a darker state of mind, I take comfort in living through my artworks.

My art has always contained themes of either nature, nostalgia, or both because these themes bring me serenity. Hayao Miyazaki and Monet have inspired my work more than anyone or anything else. I discovered them both when I was very young and I associate their art styles with my childhood, which is another source of inspiration. In one of my more recent pieces, titled Childhood Clouds, I looked at a bunch of screencaps of scenery from Miyazaki’s animated film My Neighbor Totoro. This was the first movie I’d seen by him, and I’ll never forget how pleasing and comforting the cumulus clouds looked through my child eyes. For this piece, I want to capture the subtle orange and pink glow that occurs right before sunset, as well as the dramatic contrast between the blue sky and the light colors on the clouds. Much like me, Miyazaki manages to add elements of the natural world into every single one of his films. He captures it in such a beautiful way that it indirectly makes a statement about how humans must appreciate nature much more than we do already. Some of the main plots of his films are about conserving nature or protecting wildlife, such as Princess Mononoke and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. These two films have inspired me as an artist as well, in a much more intense way. While some of his films are airy and sweet, there are others who capture the deep anger and sadness surrounding environmental destruction. Miyazaki is one of the only artists I’ve come across that has accurately portrayed the contrasting feelings of cute love for lush greenery and powerful anger toward those who disrespect the environment. Environmental issues are important to me as well, and I try to incorporate natural elements into my pieces because this world’s greenery is too perfect not to capture in a painting. My piece, Tucker Pond is nostalgic for me the same way Miyazaki’s films are nostalgic because it’s a painting of a lake I’ve stayed at with my extended family since I was a baby, and summer itself is a time many people (me included) enjoy reminiscing about.

Monet’s painting style is one of my favorites, and I attempt to mimic the way he captures light shining through trees. This is evident in my pieces Late August and Tucker Pond. Monet’s piece Water Lily Pond is one I take lots of inspiration from because of the way he catches the green reflections on the water with the waterlilies gracefully floating on top. In my piece Tucker Pond, I included reflections on the lake of the floats, but I wish I paid more attention to the reflections of the trees above. I try to imitate Monet’s brushstrokes, and this is especially evident in my piece titled Hideout in the way that I painted the trees along with the sunlight shining down through them. Much like Hayao Miyazaki, Monet paints many natural landscapes full of flowers and other greenery. Both the subject matter and impressionistic style of Monet’s artwork inspires my own.

My art making process is honestly very random and impulsive. I have what looks like an endless list of ideas for paintings that I’ve written down over the past few years, and I think that I’ve only painted one of the ideas from that list. Often when I start to plan an artwork in a process portfolio page or something similar, I lose about sixty percent of the desire to create the artwork because for some reason it does not feel special anymore. My best paintings have resulted from an impulsive rush of energetic inspiration because I start it right away and try to get it done before I get bored of it. I always strive to create a piece with very captivating scenery and composition, and if the subjects of the piece are too small or the color scheme is ugly, I either gesso over the canvas and start something else or I abandon it altogether. I choose what I want to create based on how strongly my feelings are about the idea. My favorite paintings and painting ideas always include something in nature, whether it’s a whole lake, some sunflowers or just a cloud. My ideas usually come from going somewhere beautiful or looking back on old photos from happy times. Lately, I’ve been deprived of eventful real life experiences so most of my inspiration has come from watching different animated series or movies that have really awesome and contrasting color schemes, much like my painting titled January. When I paint, I do a very sloppy underpainting followed by random splashes of color to mark where I want certain objects to go. After that, I build off the colors and the painting gradually comes together. It’s always hard for me to tell if a piece is done or not. If you ask me, I could go back to all my “finished” paintings and fix things until it looks like an entirely different painting. To make sure it matches up to my standard at least a little bit, I have to stand very far away from the piece and look at it for several minutes before walking closer to the piece and then further again to make sure it looks how I want from far away. I also take several photos of it and look at the photos to make sure it looks alright on camera.

Right now, I’m working on three artworks at the same time because I have a lot of new ideas for techniques and composition that I don’t want to forget about or lose interest over. One of my biggest differences from my new work and my old work is that I’m much better at accurately painting light reflecting off objects because I’ve started using very, very light yellow and orange rather than plain white. This difference in capturing light can be seen from Dancing Sunflowers to Late August because I didn’t use any white to highlight objects. The three pieces I’m currently working on have larger subjects with fewer details because I haven’t really done compositions like that before. I wanted to try this because I’ve realized that looking at pieces with larger subjects with more simple backgrounds are really cool to view, especially from further away. This is the type of composition I’m exploring with Childhood Clouds and a little bit with January. The painting style in January is a little bit more challenging because it’s completely different from what I’m used to. The different shading and lighting is much more like solid colored shapes put together rather than impressionist brush strokes and the colors are much more contrasting, vibrant, and unnatural (in a very good way) than my other pieces. I’m also experimenting with flip book animation with my piece titled Fun. I haven’t tried animating anything since I was about ten years old using a Nintendo DS, so I wanted to start with something simple before moving on to a digital animation program. Since I’ve been watching a lot more animated movies with all this time on my hands, it reminded me how I used to love making short silly animations with my DS and I wanted to try it again. It’s a bit challenging because it can be tedious at times but I’m already pleased with the progress I’ve made so far. In my exhibition, Im going to put the pieces Childhood Clouds, Dancing Sunflowers, and Tucker Pond in the center in the wall in a triangle formation with the cloud piece on top, the lake piece on the bottom right, and the sunflower piece on the bottom left. I chose this formation because they’re the happiest pieces and I think they look really well connected to each other in terms of subject matter and color scheme. Underneath the trio of paintings, I’m going to have my piece titled January because the contrast between this piece and the other three will be interesting because viewers will be able to see my drastic change in mood and inspiration. On the top right side of the wall, I’m going to have my piece Sea Level because it’s very large and I think it would look best higher up. Below the large piece, I’m going to have Still Life and Kitchen because they’re a lot more simple and not conceptually deep so they can be at the end of the wall flow (idk if this makes sense). On the left side of the wall, I’m going to have my piece Late August and Hideout stacked with the August piece on top. I think placing these two pieces together will work very well because they have a similar color scheme and both contain lots of beautiful flowers. They also look like they could’ve been painted around the same area. Lastly, I’ll have some sort of stand on the right side of the wall that will hold my flip animation titled Fun so it can sort of act as the ending piece if viewers are looking at my work on the wall from left to right. I think it will tie everything together pretty nicely.

As a whole, my work explores themes of nature and nostalgia while often capturing movement and unity. Most of my artistic inspiration stems from works by Hayao Miyazaki and Monet, as well as from the natural world itself, typically in the summertime when everything is green. I think that if my artwork was viewed in chronological order, there would be a very noticeable difference and improvement in the quality and subject matter of the work. My goals for creating artwork is to bring positive and nostalgic feelings to viewers, but my main aspiration is to bring myself peace by creating art.