End of the Year

It's the end of the year, so it is time to reflect on my time in Grade 11:

Which work do you feel is the most successful piece this year and why?

I have a difficulty of deciding whether I believe my most successful piece would be my acrylic paint pastiche based on Georges Seurat's pointilism piece, A Sunday on the Internet, or my paper cutout text piece inspired by Annie Vought, Dear Diary. Both of those pieces took a lot of time to investigate, explore and create. For my pastiche piece, I had to really know the colours and their saturations really well as for most of the painting, I never mixed any of the colours. I simply lay the hues side by side in a grid format to create the illusion of an overall colour. I think that it was very successful in technique as the shapes were all very similar as well as the colours, I believe. As well, I think that the message I was trying to convey was quite clear, considering the size and the scale of the app icons were quite large yet still in scale with the people in the painting. I also think that my text piece was very successful and I was able to get very detailed carvings with the diary entry using a craft knife. I think that it came with knowing the text really well as well as doing a good transfer with tracing the text onto tracing paper and placing it onto the larger black paper which I then lightly carved out of. I think that the message is quite self explanatory as well and wouldn't take too much to recognize.

Which one were you disappointed with and why?

The piece I am most disappointed with this year would be the first piece that I did from the What You Value unit which was a digital photography unit done on Photoshop which I called Insecurities. That piece was originally supposed to be done in watercolour and pencil to show the contrast in tones and saturation, greyscale with pencil and multicoloured with watercolour, yet the technique that I had developed wasn't working with the human figures that I was drawing, so I ended up with using photography and digitally manipulating them in Photoshop. I don't think the brush strokes looked very realistic either and matched the style of the photographs, which is why I was disappointed with it.

What did you learn about yourself?

I think all in all this year, the most I learnt about myself were my preferences and what I cared about most in artistic style. My downfalls I would say this year would be the first two units which both happened to be on digital photography and I didn't enjoy those units as much as the ones where I was working with my hands on a canvas or paper. I learnt that I really like doing technical and refined work with my hands instead of using a mouse and scrolling on a screen. I also learnt that what I really care about is line work and that is what I find the most appealing in art pieces and the first thing I look for as it can be both simple and complicated in form and shape.

What is your theme moving forward?

My theme that I decided on through the development of my art pieces is showing someone's identity and telling their story. I believe that every one of us are so different and we all have our own experiences that we can share, and we shouldn't be judged because of it or we shouldn't change ourselves to fit what other people think we should be like or what we should have.

How are you planning to develop your theme further?

So far, I've done a lot of personal pieces on how I feel and my own experiences, or as a more broader subject on the identity issues. I would like to develop my theme by exploring society's expectations as well as exploring perhaps the stories of others are going more indepth into my more emotional experiences compared to the ones on the surface level.