Klimt and My Artist Statement

The artist who inspired me the most on my final project is Gustav Klimt. He was an Austrian Symbolist painter who lived from 1862 to 1918. In many of his paintings, he focuses on the female body as his subject, surrounded by many marks of different colors and textures. Inspired by Japanese art, his paintings have a stylistic use of lines, a very flat, two dimensional depiction of the subject and an attention to detail. I have always been inspired by his draftsmanship; his use of lines is sensual and loose yet very frank and direct. It makes his subjects look mysterious. I also admire his painting style, how he fills each and every corner of his painting with detail. As a Symbolist artist, the colorful marks he make in his paintings stand for something. In a way, Klimt’s art has influenced me to use symbolism in my project as well.

My three paintings depict a self portrait of myself, curled up in a blanket, sleeping. Sleep is a very important subject to me because of my love/hate relationship with it. I love to sleep when I am tired, and I am usually always tired because of sleep deprivation, but often times, I cannot fall asleep because I would think of all the things I could be doing in the hours I spend sleeping.

I am interested in the use of aromatherapy, how different flowers affect sleep. Having used Chinese aromatherapy a couple of times and I was surprised that it somewhat works. The different smells of different flowers calms you, makes you think of different things in your sleep. For example, the cherry plum allows the mind to surrender to slumber, the morning glory helps to adjust your sleeping schedule and the chestnut helps to make the sleeper feel safe and supported. Even though these descriptions are maybe too good to be true, I'm interested in how different smells shape dreams. Dreams can seem like real life, except for a few changes or bizarre occurrences, such as when the flowers start to flow out of your blanket.

The image that I am trying to portray is split into three parts, each on three different sized canvases. I wanted to use three different sized canvas because I wanted to play with the size of different spaces I could use to depict a part of a whole picture. The biggest canvas that I made is 3x5 ft, and it contains the head and an arm of the sleeping subject. The second canvas is 3x3 ft, which contains the drifting arm of the subject. The third and smallest canvas is 3x2 ft and it contains the feet peeking out from under the blankets. I picked three types of flowers to focus on, the first one being the cherry plum, the second being the morning glory and the third being the sweet chestnut. I wanted to show a surrealistic scene of myself sleeping, dreaming of the therapy I am undergoing in order to adjust my bad sleeping habits.