Sustained Investigation II

Tough Love

7 in x 5 in

Acrylic & paper on wood

For this assignment, we were asked to create a second work that reflected our inquiry question within our sustained investigation series. With my inquiry question being "How can I convey mental illness through art?" I wanted to make a piece that portrayed the stigmas and other concepts surrounding mental illness as a whole. From looking at my piece, it is clear that the concepts surrounding mental illness, like stress and tough love, are the messages that I desired to show. This project relates to my life, because as someone who suffers with mental illness and knows many people who do, I wanted to expose the stigmas and portray them through an eye-catching work of art.

I started this piece with a piece of wood that I gessoed and painted with pale orange acrylic. From there, I printed out my reference image of myself and sketched it onto the surface. I used a gray scale picture because I wanted all of my values to be blue, which could be interpreted as a symbol of sadness or depression. I painted the portrait with acrylic paint, and then started cutting out magazine clippings to create my collage background. I wanted to use warmer colors for the background to contrast with the colors in the portrait. The idea behind this decision is that often times, mental illness is glorified, so I used pink, orange, and yellow clippings to create background color. I then added words and phrases to complete my message and make it more clear to the viewer.

Originally, I was going to create the background with acrylic, as well. However, I thought it would be more interesting and more effective to use words and phrases, so that is why I chose to do mixed media for this project. My next steps could be making multiples of this project, and do varying colors and words to convey different meanings.