Painting Journey Part 1 (Patreon)

Hello everyone! I'm going to do a series of posts this year talking about my painting and how it has evolved over the years post-college. And so today, we start with part 1, which isn't even technically painting at all!

During college, my focus in my visual art studies was oil painting, and I did a whole lot of it. When I got to the end and started creating for my final show, I surprised myself the most out of anyone by ending up not showing paintings, but a series of large scale charcoal drawings on cardboard. I continued this work for a bit after college as well.

This series was me understanding my own mind and anxieties, entering a new stage of life with lots of unknowns and getting to know myself on a deeper level as well. The drawings depicted a fragmented figure, coming through the tangled chaos of marks and shapes that create a sort of forest. There isn't a clear separation between the figure and her environment. The drawings were raw had intense energy - I created each of them in one sitting as to explore and capture a current state of being, and because of the large size the act of creating them was very physical. It was a bit like a performance, but with no audience.

You'll see in the next post how I brought these figurative forest themes back into oil painting as a medium!