Compositional Complements

In this art exhibition a focus on composition and mastering techniques that I was unfamiliar with was incredibly important both to my entire exhibition and my growth as an artist. When creating art, each piece was a journey into the challenges and unknowns of my own style. I wanted to pursue, discover, and master techniques through each artistic unit and altogether create a series of work that complemented one another.

All of my work reflects this investigation of composition, attention to detail, and the complementation of artistic elements. When viewing my exhibition through a virtual lens I chose to organize certain works together based on material usage as well as their relation to one another. My charcoal and space paintings have their own page dedicated to the exploration of new materials and new ways to master those materials. These main pages highlight the struggles of learning something new and the application of hours of practice on a different artistic medium. I grouped my other pieces in trios to highlight both their size, but how smaller pieces are powerful together. I felt that the body of work reached its culmination when understanding my exhibitions main focus. Each piece develops "Composition" in each their own way. I hope that when viewers engage with these bodies of work they will see the process that I pursued with each piece. This could be the steps I took when planning the background to the foreground with watercolor. Or the steps I took when determining the background and what had to overlap in different collages. This could be the ability to understand what colors could mix with one another to emphasize contrast or juxtapose one another.

The nature of my series of works altogether is intended to convey different compositions and the way that changes through many different mediums and materials. While creating my art from home, the pandemic caused many drawbacks but also lots of inspiration. My trio of works highlighted towards the end, "Broken," "Sky Bike," and "Transparency" were inspirations of both my memories of what life used to be and what life is now. COVID-19 made its way into my art and in that way I was able to convey even more emotions. While "Broken" conveys a clear subject matter that viewers can easily understand, I created other work that subtly hinted at my own experiences with despair and hopelessness. My delicate experiences conveyed through collages, overlapping, and watercolor was the apex of my art process overall. Although inspiration arose from the lonely pandemic, there were also many faults. There were months at a time where I struggled to even create art and this took a toll on my mastery. To push past this drawback and implication on my art-making I dove deeper into different forms of art mediums and instead of working with just pencil or paint, I worked with cardboard collage, stencils, pen, and even metal. Without the pandemic I wouldn't have gotten the opportunity to explore myself even more as an artist or even get the chance to understand my own personal style. Fortunately, this chance to discover something new, ignited further inspiration and got me back on track with mastering my attempts to complement composition, strengthening my confidence in my style, and helping me pursue greater challenges I hope to master in my future.