Tuesday, December 13, 2016

James Jean and Artist Statement

Recently I have been invested in James Jean’s work and his abstraction and freedom of creating his own environments in art.  In his work, there is a lot of fluidity of creating different planes and having them intersect whether they be figures or fluid stokes resembling a landscape. In my final, I aimed to be more relaxed in my stokes and trust experimentation with paint as well as allowing the viewer to understand my work rather than spelling it out for them.


In Jean’s pieces, he has detail to the point of abstraction. I find myself getting caught up in realism and the detail behind it, that I sometimes lose my creativity in painting. Comparing myself to Jean, I hope to create a focused color pallet with fluid stokes and still maintaining a solid idea and narrative behind it.  



With his work, there is an openness to interpretation from all viewpoints, which makes it all the more compelling. I personally tried to incorporate size and shape into my pieces just as much as the paint itself. Through this, I hope to take the viewer away into this mental world that they can decided the narrative and easily attach their own beliefs to.  

When it comes to Jean’s techniques, the smoothness of his pieces are impeccable. To incorporate that into my work, I tried to play with the balance of my pieces. By having 4 be skewed but equal in overall size, I was very conscious of having a balance of imagery. On my side panels, which were almost the most difficult part, I had to really know how to step back and not overdo anything. Especially the experimentation of them, I found myself at times trying to do more than I had to and catching myself in the act. Overall, this collection was a personal challenge but with this inspiration in the back of my mind, I was focused enough to try to change myself to better serve the vision.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Over the years, I have come to realize that my art always has a narrative. Telling stories is my passion whether it is through acting, art, or something in-between. Having the opportunity to create my own stories and share experiences or feeling that can somehow be communicated universally is something I strive for.
With this collection, the focus of religion and how it seems to have been a universal feeling and belief for thousands of years was extremely important. The fact that millions are faithfully dedicated to a form of afterlife spanning over so many different religions is something magical. With that, I chose to explore the relationship between an unearthly “good place” and “bad place”. However, abstracting them, I wanted to highlight there are always hidden negatives and positives to every situation and setting.

Being inspired by the true definition of sublime, “the [beautiful] … does not invite such contemplation but instead is an overpowering or vast malignant object of great magnitude, one that could destroy the observer (Arthur Schopenhauer)”, I wanted to represent the other sides of Heaven and Hell that can cause confusion and doubt with previously conceived notions like many situations that are faced in everyday life driven to the extreme.

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