Advanced Life Drawing : Aspartame - the marriage of nature, psychedelia and us.

When I think about humans morphing or being conjoined with another entity or object, the first thing I think about is nature. It's what we live amongst, live off of, and simultaneously destroy. It's no secret that nature is becoming something people are wanting to save due to the fact that we have slowly been chipping away at it for centuries. Now many of these things we used to take for granted are becoming precious and bordering on extinction. Nature is something that I took for granted when I grew up. I grew up on a small island on the far north coast of Washington State. Here, there is no shortage of water, evergreen trees, naturally growing weeds, bushes, fields, flowers, miles and miles of grass, fresh ocean sprayed air and beaches sprinkled with plants and weeds. Moving to Southern California changed my perspective completely, and made me appreciate nature in a new way. Because now, I realize that it is something to be honored and even worshiped. I have a very special relationship to nature, and because of this I often incorporate these feelings and ideas into my art work. In this piece, I wanted to demonstrate what it means to me to be a human being living on planet earth in a surrealistic way.

This piece is inspired by aspartame art, which is a style of art created by an artist that uses the surname "aspartame" who started a 'tumblr wide' trend in the art world of the internet. The drawings usually include pink tones, neon color schemes, semi realistic women and couples, psychedelic elements, and most importantly: a clear relationship between the figures in the drawings and nature. Because of this, I've always been entranced by these drawings. I discovered them a few years ago and I'm surprised to say that I have not yet (until now) used these pieces as inspiration in my own work. So what I chose to do was draw a figure that from the neck down appears to be fully human in the nude, and from the neck up is an extension of the natural world around us. I drew a figure sitting with their knees hugged into their chest (the figure is gender neutral) and an array of plants, leaves, stems, and flowers exploding from the neck as if it were the head of the person.

In aspartame style art, the backgrounds are usually bright hues of pink, orange, blue, or purple. I chose to use a muted light pink as the background wash because I love the feeling and mood that the color pink creates. It's very warming, happy, soft, and contrasts the green of the plants and leaves. The figure is also shaded with colors of pink, orange, blue and purple which are obviously not natural or what you would normally see on a human in real life, but I wanted to incorporate the psychedelic elements that aspartame art usually has in it's work, which also bring in connotations of meditation and mindful thinking.