Question of the Year: What is My Concentration

Ha. 

Ok, so I've struggled with this. Still haven't quite nailed it down, but here goes in response to these questions. 

What is the central idea of your concentration?


My concentration focuses in on the unfocused, the blurry, and the obscure, in the hopes of portraying people and our memories of people and ourselves as we see and understand one another: some parts definitive and sharp, others sketchy and unclear. To paint a clear picture of a person, sometimes it takes a fuzzy one. To paint a picture of the present, sometimes it takes a picture of the past. 

How does the work in your concentration demonstrate the exploration of your idea? You may refer to specific images as examples. When referencing specific images, please indicate the image numbers.

This year, I struggled to pin down my concentration. The only commonality between the works I would create was that part of them or all of them would be painted over in frustration. Then, I thought, why not let that become in itself a concentration? From the blurred out images, I found clarity, and sought to represent that mix of blurriness and definition in all my pieces. Combining rough, textural strokes with defined contour lines, smoky layers through which past strokes are still remembered, each portrait had the kind of dimensionality of a real person. The past of each became as important to me as the present state in which they are displayed. I began to use old family photos, attached to the idea of memory, and how it every memory has both blurry and strikingly clear parts to it. In Butts (What AButt It?), I obscured parts of the figures and accentuated others. In the image Mom and Big Baby Brother, drawn from an old family photo, one can see strokes from when I began to work on it, through the three times I gessoed over parts. In Hold On (to the Balloon), I mixed contour lines with gestural ones with smooth paint. The piece Sitting Waiting Wishing (with Laura) is drawn on salvaged wood, with the same idea of salvaging the past, a memory, and making it important, a part of the present.