Sustained Investigation #8

Artist Statement:

For this project, I focused on the idea of how people take animals out of their natural environments, put them in new false ones, but do not come close to the freedom that they would have experienced in nature. This fit into my guiding sustained investigation, which has morphed into "How do animals and humans impact each other?" I wanted to emphasize this point by creating a busy and vibrant nature scene while there was an empty looking enclosure in the middle.

For this project, I used mostly charcoal pastel. This was originally supposed to be soil, at least for the ground, to create a realistic texture. However, I ended up using it for the whole thing. The only other thing I really did was use a circle cutout of a plastic sheet, which I overlayed over the enclosure to make it seem like the real thing. 

I started by creating the background. I wanted it to seem like it was fading out in the back, so I used lighter shades there, and darker clear shades and forms toward the front. I tried to make these more crisp, and then to make the ground grittier for purposes of accuracy. I purposefully excluded a background from the portion of the piece inside the enclosure with the little "gecko." I wanted this to show the emptiness inside. Finally, I glued the plastic on top to mimic the materials of a real terrarium/enclosure.