Artist Quote 12/12/12

"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time."

-Thomas Merton

Artist Statement

When I got the final assignment for design, I was totally overwhelmed seeing that I felt personally obligated to meet high standards. I constantly feel that everything I do artistically must be clean, sharp, detailed, and neat. Therefore, I was a bit concerned and anxious about the painting aspect. My artistic style is very romantic and dreamlike, so I wanted to incorporate those factors into my final design. At first I had no idea what to do. I had to create a microcosm, a macrocosm, and the Golden Mean (Fibonacci sequence.) The first thing that popped into my head was a wilting daisy as my macrocosm which steered me to the idea of the dead of winter. As I started to research the Fibonacci sequence, I came across many images that lead me to the idea of spiralling thorns, which eventually would become the Golden Mean. The thorns seemed to harmonise perfectly with a rose, but not a daisy per say. Roses are more romantic and fairytale-like. I looked at many images of roses and decided to zoom in on one and abstract it. I knew then that I wanted to incorporate a winter landscape. Bare trees, snow, and an icy path with a reflection of the moon hit me all at once. I struggled with the pathway in the macrocosm because I wanted to create a reflection that slowly faded out into darker values. However, I would say the most difficult part for me was the rose. I found it frustrating to zoom in and abstract it. As soon as I started to play with value in the rose, I realised that I wanted to really zoom in to the inner-most parts of the blossom. My last challenge was what to do with the negative space in the wintery landscape. I knew that I needed to add a dark color to help the moon pop. But I knew that would take away from the path and the trees; so, I came to the consensus of a horizon line. After doing so, I feel my design came together in a unified way: It is romantic, wintery, and fairytale-like. I genuinely loved doing this project. It was challenging, yet inspiring and I learned so much more about myself in the process.

Final painting!

I finished my painting finally! I struggled with the rose but I chose to abstract it. Also I struggled with what to do with the negative space in the macrocosm, so, I made a horizon line because it would show that it is night time. Anyway, I'm happy with it!

scientific principles panel progress

This is my scientific principles panel. the microcosm is on the left. It's supposed to be a dying daisy. the middle is a stream of icy water with winter trees (which i have not finished yet) and the right is my golden mean. I made spiralling thorns. That part is finished. The part that I'm still a little stuck on is my daisy. I feel like it should maybe be a rose because that ties in better with the thorns and the macrocosm.   So I need some feedback on if I should change that. (I think I should) and it would be a little more fairytale/romantic/dead of winter concept that I was going for