Sustained Investigation #12

Process Images:

Artist's Statement:

Jillian Wight

Medsker

AP Art and Design

9 March 2022

With this work, I really wanted to take a more sunny approach to my inquiry question. I wanted to focus on how I perceive beauty, and how it manifests itself in my daily life. I also really wanted to work on synthesizing my materials with my theme. I decided to focus on traditionally female realms of art, and my research told me that women traditionally practice more utilitarian crafts, such as beading and quilting. It also said that women traditionally create work that is seen as “supporting” art, and the materials available to them have been cheaper, such as watercolors, etc. Females and the female body are an extremely prevalent subject in art, but female artists are still scarce to this day and hardly receive recognition. I wanted to reimagine these traditions and make them the main idea. To do so, I created the effect of a quilt using folds in the paper and patterns in my coloring. I added string to the piece, and created a composition/color scheme that was light, shining, and elusive, much like beads! I made the female body the main focus of the work to show the irony of its commonness in the art world.

I used a Sharpie felt-tip pen to create the details and layers in my work, gel pen to add highlights and further layers, showing the beaded aspect, Dual-Brush markers, watercolors because of their role in traditional female art, thread to play into the narrative of quilting, as well as cardstock and glue to help support the 3D form.

I experimented a lot with this piece. My original idea was very different from the result. I planned to sew a literal quilt out of paper and felt, but this proved very difficult. The piece I have now started as a doodle I made during french class based on a Picasso painting I’d studied the day before, Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. I then developed it and realized that I really wanted to incorporate it into my next art piece. I recalculate my plan and ended up with what I had. To keep the quilting aspect visible, I used square color blocks and added string to the page.

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