Sustained Investigation #11

Artist's Statement:

Jillian Wight

Medsker

AP Art and Design 

27 February 2023

I was inspired to create this piece after a really killer end to my last high school nordic season.  It was crazy to think about how I wouldn’t have an opportunity to ski on a team like that again, even though it was something I’d enjoyed so much!  It made me think about how this year my friends and I have experienced so many endings, and while we are all really excited for the different things that are coming, it can feel pretty sad at the same time.  I wanted to create a piece that reflected how I felt, like I was being rocketed past all these things but couldn’t stop to experience them again.  I wanted to really focus on facial expression to convey emotion, and I also positioned the body so that the shoulders were facing forward on the right end of the piece, to show that the character is moving forward, but that’s not what the moment is about.

I used blue watercolor to create this piece because I wanted the focal point to be the emotion I was expressing, rather than my use of color.  I liked the way the deep blue looked, and it was also a fun challenge for me to focus solely on highlights and shadows.  I used snow instead of water to paint originally, though the effect wasn’t much different than if I’d just used water.  I used blue glitter glue to highlight the tears of the character (based around the phrase “don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened”), because one of my favorite pre-race rituals during the nordic season was to put glitter on before our races.  

I experimented quite a bit with this piece, originally I had a totally different composition in mind!  I wanted to show a person with the same facial expression being blasted out of a rocket, but the arrangement and subject matter was so scattered and I had trouble simplifying and clarifying the focus, so I started over with a different approach.  I’m really happy with the result!  I played around with the idea of adding a second panel, but decided I liked the ambiguity of the piece and I didn’t really know what else I wanted to include.

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