Date of Submission

Spring 2020

Academic Program

Studio Arts

Project Advisor 1

Jeffrey Gibson

Project Advisor 2

Ken Buhler

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Making Space for You is a senior thesis submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College. I created Making Space for You over the course of 8 months in my studio and in my living room of my apartment. My intentions for my paintings are to create an aesthetically awesome image that the viewer is automatically attracted to. I use color confidently to make the paintings strong and catchy. I enjoy painting people, hands, feet and objects. The project began with oil paint and the goal to teach myself to paint an image of people in a space in a more rendered way which relied on the use of light, shadows, foreground, background, subtle color shifts, and fine tuning. Although I am happy with the first works of the series, throughout the project, my goals began to shift as people seemed to gravitate towards my spontaneous lines, colors and shapes. Abstraction in the work proved to be the most interesting to the viewer. I continuously played with a balance of graphic and spatial, sharp line and washy space, aiming to balance intuitive mark making and image recreation. Mostly working from photos, I have painted these images of people and then went back in to abstract them. At some point this shifted and a new process came with me to my living room where I finished the project with acrylic paint and ink. The new process is the opposite, an abstract start to the painting and then trying to work in space and figures. In terms of narrative, because my work is based on photos or an amalgamation of photos, my paintings are inherently narrative, but at this point in my exploration I am not too worried about the story that my work tells as long as I feel interested in the image itself, the narrative will come naturally. Along with thinking about where I paint, and space within my paintings, I ultimately want to be Making Space for You, the viewer, to interpret but simultaneously understand - possibly the underlying goal of my endeavor to mix abstraction with realism. My hope is that the audience of the paintings will be attracted to the colors and crazy shapes, but stay for the image content. Making Space for You can be seen as another chapter in my exploration of painting.

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