Advanced Life Drawing : Project Two

When I first began this project, I was very conflicted. A political project? I have been so inundated with politics these past two years, I was dreading coming back to the United States from my study abroad sheerly because of the political mess. But I started in and brainstormed what I cared about most. There are so many things that I care about. I am a person who cares about almost everything and everyone but I am also a person who likes to follow a rational line of thinking. It frustrates me when random violence occurs in the name of "change". I am all for positive change but not when it means senseless riots and people getting hurt. Not when it means screaming obscenities at your friends and family because they don't agree with you. Not when it means dividing the nation even more with hypocrisy and hatred. I can't get behind that. But, I realized, I can get behind healing things with love, seeking the root of the problem: mentality. People's pain influences their behavior towards others, usually causing more pain, more suffering. If we can help people become more aware of mentality and how much it can affect not only ourselves but everyone around us, we begin to stand a chance against the perpetual violence that seems to plague humanity.

I started by looking at artists like Vincent Van Gogh who, psychiatrists have long speculated, had a mood disorder. Looking at his blue swirling tones, his painting style, there are indication that he dealt with quite a few mental and emotional barriers. I then started looking for artists that created physical representations of mentality or at least their perception of it. I came across Shawn Coss who worked as an illustrator for 7 years, coming up with the famous comic Cyanide and Happiness before he started publishing his work independently. He makes these haunting ink pieces that show in a physical nature what it's like to deal with mental illness. I would say that his pieces spark interest and curiosity into what it's like to have that illness and what it actually means. From there I found Toby Allen, who created mental illness as physical monsters, an online artist known as Riftress who gives her mental health awareness a voice through her ink drawings in the Stickmen Series's, Stephanie Kyriacou, who uses surrealism to get her feelings across, and online artist Giedre who uses his passion for architecture to represent the human being as a house, the building that homes the illness.

Each of these artists have a unique take on how mental illness affects the people around them and represent it in their own way. All of these artists have influenced me and I chose to go the route of metaphorical realism to represent the masks we wear every day to cover all the problems we don't want to show every day.