My senior project will be an exploration of oil painting and portraiture. When thinking about what I wanted to do for my senior project, I immediately knew I wanted to incorporate drawing and painting, and my favorite subjects to draw and paint are faces. So I decided to incorporate my passion into a project surrounding oil painting and portraiture. To make my project personalized and special I will be painting important people in my life. My goal is to capture the unique personalities of these people that I know, while also evoking emotion through my artistic choices. As a way to learn and grow through my project, I will be exploring and learning how to use oil paint. My project will also consist of research on portraiture and the work that has been done historically involving portraits – Who has historically had their portrait painted? What does it mean to have a portrait of yourself?I will do a large portion of this research by going to museums and finding inspiration from the all the art around me.

Throughout an honors project I did last year, I learned that creating art above everything is about expression. It’s not about creating the closest thing to a reference photo, or even the image you imagined in your head. It’s about the development of a piece, the process from having a creative idea to finishing that last brush stroke on your painting. I have gotten very frustrated by trying to perfect my art and trying to create with strict goals and expectations for my work. Throughout the project, I allowed myself to take art less seriously, and that experience expanded my abilities as an artist and has made me create more art overall. It is a goal of mine to step away from having these expectations for my art, and just allow myself to create without these boundaries; creating art is only fun this way. Throughout that honors project, I had been working on two different techniques. A realistic/receptive style and an abstract projective style of my imagination. In my senior project, I want to focus on exploring more on both of these styles (even combining them together) and finding my own.

My senior project will be a success if I have truly expanded my abilities as an artist and found my place in the world of art. Through exploring different styles of art in the portraits that I paint, I want my personalized style to shine through. I would also love to make possible offers from people to work with me and my art. I not only want to continue drawing and painting, but I also want to experience what creativity feels like in the real world and as a job, through learning from other artists and becoming one myself. By the end of the project, I will have more experience writing about my art and learning what art means to me, and potentially connecting this passion to other areas of interest that I have. Ultimately, I will be proud of my project if I stick to the main goal I have which is letting go of perfectionism and allowing myself to be creative without so many boundaries.