Sunday, September 26, 2010

Dedicated to my brothers and sisters under the cloud...

For the past couple months I've been doing a lot of work involving depression with Chlorine Nights (which should be printed soon) and a couple other pieces including The Black Dog. It's something myself, as well as most of my family, have struggled with throughout our lives. So it seems only natural that I would eventually confront depression in my art. It's also something that I feel most everybody can identify with. Whether or not you have been diagnosed, or you feel sad, or you don't feel any sign of it at all...everyone recognizes that familiar feeling. The cloud of hopelessness, loneliness, or ambiguity has touched everyone's shoulder at least once in life. Whether a loved one died or your heart was broken...the feeling of depression is something we can all relate to. With these new works I want to aesthetically reproduce exactly what depression feels like to me, in simple terms. I want the pieces to be noisy and uncared for. I want to feel rather uncomfortable when painting them. The paint is applied in thick coats while aerosol runs over top. I feel the essence of the dark paint and the thick, muddy aerosol illustrate at least one corner of depression. I don't hope you understand the disease by looking at these pieces, I hope that you can get closure. I hope that you can get a hint of what I feel all the time. And I hope that these works show you that there are people out there that understand. You are not alone.


The first attempt. And yes they are self-portraits




I used a lot of umbers with the acrylic, never any pure black.




The paper I used was a 300lb. Arches paper. Extremely heavy and durable to a ton of saturation.
I then attached it to panel later on.

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