Over the course of this Senior Project experience, I’ve got an insight into my psychology behind my work. I’ve witnessed the fear and trepidation behind my process. I’ve seen how it can prolong the time I spend on pieces. But I’ve also seen how it compels me to constantly improve my craft. It motivated me to spend hours a day studying anatomy. It inspired me to do several tests on a new method of painting. For a while, I somewhat knew this. Compared to other students in my past Studio Art classes, I spent the most time doing thumbnails and color studies. While I’ve seen a quicker approach to art making work for others, I feel that my more cautious approach has worked for me.
When it comes to the intricacies of my artmaking, I’ve noticed I now try to keep my content more subtle than it needs to be. This habit arised from my past paintings, my experience with James, and analyzing masterful works. For the past few years, the majority of my finished pieces have been part of my ongoing series called Fauna. While the themes of the pieces stem from my experiences, I try to keep my art vague enough that the only part of me that is being transferred through my work is the emotion, and that viewers can take that emotion and project their own stories onto my piece. Then, while brainstorming my second Fauna piece made under James’ guidance, he helped me remove the overtness of my initial ideas, leading to the creation of another intriguing yet ambiguous piece of mine. As James often states, this covertness is what often separates fine arts from illustration. And as I study masterful works of fine arts, I further see how painters walk this fine line between the two fields. So, entering this project, I prepared to make subtle pieces of art. This intention led me to quiet, and perhaps boring ideas. As I brainstormed and executed these pieces, James constantly reminded me that with a subject matter like this, I should raise the drama and embrace the overtness.
What do I know I don’t know? I don’t know where the line between fine arts and illustration is, and I am not sure if I will ever know. I have been walking this fine line for the past four years, and I foresee me walking it for the rest of my artistic career.