Design With Circles

Artist Statement

For this piece, I was inspired by the African goddess of earth and motherhood, Asase Ya. When considering the circle-related prompt, I immediately thought of spheres that serve as the foundation for life- the earth, and the cells that make up living creatures. I did some research to find a representative of life, earth, and motherhood (which seemed to fit perfectly into the picture considering the term “mother earth” that cells are essentially the product of reproduction) and eventually came across Asase Ya. Using my materials I depicted Asase Ya surrounded by jungle greenery, holding a baby close to her chest. Her earrings are crafted in the shape of the symbol Asase Ye Duru, a representation of the power, providence, and divinity of mother earth. The print on her clothing is a symbol of the sun, another sphere-shaped provider of life. The entire images is contained within a circle, meant to represent the form of Earth. I chose to work from this inspiration because I am fascinated by African culture and history and was instinctively drawn to the ideas of earth and motherhood when I began brainstorming for my project.

For this project, I began by using a glass bowl to trace the shape of a large circle in the middle of my page (an 11x14 piece of mixed media paper). I then went in with a hard graphite pencil to lightly sketch out the forms of my subject and their surroundings. Once I finished this, I used Dual Brush markers to color in the woman, her clothes, the greenery surrounding her, and the sky. While I did this I used an eraser to get rid of my graphite lines, although most were light enough to be covered by the marker.

In this piece, I used line and shape to outline the circular shape of the drawing and to unify the components and message. I used vibrant colors such as oranges and greens to emphasize the cultural and environmental aspects of the artwork, and similar form and texture for the plants to give them movement. I tried to incorporate a wide range of values throughout the drawing as well to balance it out. In planning and beginning to execute my project, I switched between a few different materials and designs. I made a few sketches with varying positions for my subject and experimented with pastels before deciding on this composition. I don’t have a lot of experience with pastels and would like to get better at using them, however, considering I was planning a pretty detailed piece I thought it would be best to save that for another time.