The Whole Picture

For my exhibition, I present a series of works that show how meaningful my friends are, and how their psychological disorders help me deal with mine. The objective is to present pieces that span across a broad range of positive and negative experiences, using my private and unspoken memories, in a massive collage. This includes the corner of two white walls, in a space about twenty feet by twenty and several large paintings, ranging from six to eight feet in height, hung and spaced apart from one another. Between the large paintings, smaller paintings, sketches, studies and music lyrics hang in a collage-like fashion. Within the floor space, near the works, is a performance. Presenting my friends and I as living paintings, covered with watercolor marks that correlate to our two dimensional counterparts. I am sharing an intimate and private conversation with each friend, where I am communicating through a hand written journal that only my friends and I can read and respond to one another. Only our reactions are seen by others. I start the conversation by speaking openly and honestly to my friends about why I paint them constantly, and what I truly think about them. Due to COVID-19, my body of work will be in the form of an online zoom presentation. With a mix of painting, performance, conversation, and sketches to visualize our intimacy, and relationships, are with my friends, and is not a one dimensional medium or process. Every artwork has been created and intertwined by these four mediums. A single work is made with all four of these mediums, so the exhibit will include all four mediums. I love to paint because I am constantly failing at it. It is a medium that I have always been struggling to master, especially when it came to the basics. The process of painting encourages failure frequently. It allows me to explore unique solutions to all the problems I am approaching within my practice. Exploring the potential of watercolors is an infuriating and delicate medium. This paint is nothing but an expensive method to stain something with, such as wood, fabrics, and papers. It is not easy to cover up mistakes, and more often than not, results in having to start over completely. When I work with this paint, I focus on using little to no mixing between paints. I do this because I truly love and appreciate a color for how it is when squeezed straight from the tube. As an expensive staining method, this application of thin paint supports delicate textures, like wood, leaves, tape, or layers of thickly applied paint. Watercolors emphasize textures such as the fibers found within woods and fabrics, or the creases of paper, instead of covering them completely.