quiet hours

Artist's Statement:

This piece was made at a time when I was using art to cope with life. I was at summer camp, and going through some difficulty with social interactions. I guess I was feeling lonely, the type of loneliness that social interaction makes worse, so I returned to an old friend of mine.
There weren't a lot of art supplies there, just some paints. 3 big gallon-sized bottles of yellow, blue, and green acrylic, a tiny tube of white, and a bottle of a neon pink that I'm not sure was even acrylic—I remember that the label had a butterfly on it, and big purple bubble letters, but no mention of what the content was.
I just started painting. I had a photograph of myself, and I used that to get the lighting and shapes relatively accurate. It was really challenging working with a limited palette, but it was worth it. The limited colors ended up reflecting my mood. I think that effect turned out interesting to look at, because you can't be sure what is shadow and what is light.

The main thing that I think that this piece represents is my own introversion, and the time that I require to recharge my social battery. At camp it was difficult to do this, because of the constant interactions I was forced—and happy sometimes—to have. I ended up valuing more greatly the quiet hours in life, and how they are a essential part of my being. It sometimes felt I was a strange creature in isolation from the world in those times (something that I tried to accentuate in this piece, actively), and while i realized that many people go through a similar struggle, I think that we isolationists all have our own form of loneliness, that we guard closely and hoard to ourselves.