Advanced Life Drawing

For this second project, I knew immediately I wanted to address gender inequality in whatever I created. In my past art classes at Chapman, I have created a few pieces that addressed a few of the many issues regarding gender inequality in our society. My freshman and sophomore year, I took on this challenge of creating “political artwork” and was warned by my professors that it is an extremely difficult task to communicate a political message through artwork in a new, clear, and concise way. I took on the challenge anyway and have created pieces that have to do with immigration reform, gender inequality, beauty standards, etc. to the best of my ability. My pieces didn’t always get the best feedback, but one piece I was particularly proud of got great reviews by my classmates, professor, family, and friends. The aspect of this piece (pictured below) that continues to inspire me is the reclaiming of the use of the female body to convey a message. It was with this piece in mind that I approached my second project.

I grew up in church and have attended church all my life. I find I receive the most condemnation about how I live or how I express my womanhood from church people. This has been a reoccurring theme in my life and it has shaped a lot of who I am today in positive and negative ways. I recently started dating a man who goes to church. We had only been dating for a few months when a lady approached me about when we would be getting married. I was shocked and confusedly said, “No time soon. I haven’t finished school and we barely met.” She didn’t understand. After all, in the church, nearly everyone gets married a.s.a.p. once they find a partner because one, marriage to a man of God fulfills a woman’s purpose on earth and two, “the temptation to have premarital sex is far too strong in this day and age.”

“’Get married so you can properly have sex.’ Yeah, my dad would totally buy that reasoning,” I thought to myself as the lady rambled on about the various marriage options I should consider.

A couple months after that encounter, a young man approached my boyfriend and had a “heart-to-heart” discussion with him about how he thought my boyfriend needed to be dating a woman who would dedicate her life and be fully supportive of his passions and career instead of branching off and pursuing her own passions. He suggested he break up with me because I did not fit that persona. My feminist boyfriend promptly disagreed, ended the conversation, and reported the ridiculousness back to me.

I think art imitates life a lot of the time, and during the creation process of this piece, I simply wanted to address the conflict I’ve faced with expectations in the church (that also exist outside of the church) and my own personal thoughts and beliefs about womanhood. I feel overwhelmed by all of the ideas people have for my life. They want me to be bride, mom, wife, woman of God, daughter, etc. and all I want to be is myself. I do not want my identity to be reliant on a man’s success or life. I want my story to be influential, I want to change the world, I want to be successful because I AM ME. Period.

I was really excited to do this project and found it to be very therapeutic. I am thankful for art in a day and age when women are oppressed and mistreated by so many who have power and influence over us. I love my dad and my boyfriend and the many wonderful men in my life who have helped raise me and make me who I am, but in the end, it’s nice to feel proud of being a woman. That sentiment is precisely what this piece is about.

I referenced Andrea Bowers (I met her at Chapman! It was awesome! We took a picture together.) for the textual part of the piece. I have loved her work since I met her. Her use of text is striking and demanding and I find that absolutely empowering and inspirational. I want my piece to function in the same way. I want females to look at my piece and feel proud to be a woman no matter what they are feeling or experiencing at the time. In that moment, any title they were given because of a man would ideally leave their mind and they'd only reflect on their own pride and womanhood.

I chose to incorporate the text: "I am my earth, sea, and sky" in my piece for a couple reasons. One, the saying is in first person. When women see my piece, I want them to read the text and have a person relationship with it. I also chose these specific words as an allusion to the story of creation. in Genesis, the Bible says God created the earth, sea, sky, animals, humans, etc. and it was all good. He made a world he was proud of and wanted to share with humans in order to glorify his power, strength, and goodness. In the same way, women are their own greatest achievements. We are strong. We are powerful. We are good. We should be proud of ourselves and share our womanhood with others to glorify the history, strength, goodness, and power that has been and continues to be diluted, degraded, forgotten, erased, etc. I chose to show this comparison between women and creation again by using the same colors and similar painting technique in the figure and the terrestrial-like or geode-like pattern above the text.

I'd like to move forward with this series in the future. Though I displayed two pieces for the critique, I do not think the series looks or feels complete. I'd love to further explore this concepts and build upon it.

References:

Artist: Andrea Bowers

Artist: Joan Semmel

Bible: Genesis - Story of Creation

Speech: Michelle Obama Speech

Speech: Emma Watson Speech

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.