Sustained Investigation #7

Artist's Statement:

Jillian Wight

Medsker

AP Art and Design

3 December 2021

With this piece, I really wanted to explore my inquiry question much deeper. I wanted to try and represent beauty in a niche yet universal way. I wanted to provide some kind of clarity with which to examine the concept of beauty, which is so fluid. So, I decided to focus my project around the intersection of beauty and love through the lens of desire. For many, the need for love is insatiable, and so love is always in a state of desire. This absence “seeks its own fulfillment in beauty,” meaning that we try to fill the hole meant for love with beauty as a form of validation. In my artwork, I tried to capture this feeling of infinite longing for beauty and therefore for love. The person in the lower right-hand corner is being consumed by a mirror, which symbolizes the idea that she is consumed by this reflection of herself. Out of the other side of the mirror emerges a worm, suggesting that she has been corrupted by her vanity, and now is stripped of her complexity. She exists only to fulfill this desire for love through beauty. I added nets and shrouds in the sky and on the group to further push these ideas of ensnarement and delusion. The cow represents the masses, hungry and stumbling blindly towards the door, which represents the object of desire: love through beauty. On the door, a vulture is perched which places the door in an ominous and predatory context.

I used black canvas paper and acrylic paint to lay the base for this project. I then went in with photoshop to add details that I felt I wouldn't be able to capture with my brush. I then used the skin on the inside of an egg to throw shrouds across the sky, because I feel that eggs are so symbolic of femininity, and also have a complexity that the viewer can place in the context of themselves. Finally, I went in with a white gel pen to add some details and linework that brought more of my personal style to the piece, which is otherwise a deviation.

I experimented quite a bit with this work because I really wanted there to be a clear narrative. As my sketches show I played around quite a bit with what message I actually wanted to convey. I then sketched an idea but ended up adding a great deal that I had not originally planned to include. I added the vulture, the nets, the worm, etc. because I felt that they would balance the canvas and further the narrative. I also played around with composition a lot, and eventually decided on the color and nature of the setting because I thought it was very otherworldly, almost as if it existed in the mind of the viewer, where the actual struggle takes place. I ended up switching to digital editing about halfway through for both time and skill reasons, and I’m happy with the result. Finally, as I mentioned above, I brought an element of personal style to the piece with a white gel pen. This piece was certainly out of my comfort zone, and I’m not entirely sure that it is my style, but I’m proud of how expressive it is.

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