Frosted
Neva Sills is the faculty sponsor of this project.
Abstract
The most important part of my art, to me, is the feeling you get from it. My process involves a lot of writing, and a lot of honesty. It’s easy to say you’re fine, and put up walls, but that’s what I’m trying to overcome in my paintings. We all have something major that has happened in our lives. Something that keeps you up at night, something that lurks in the back of your mind during happy times. I made this body of work because the major event in my life is being adopted. From the outside, adoption is beautiful, happy, and clean, like my work at first glance. But as you look closer, you notice things aren’t what they first seemed. Things are messy or missing, just like the pieces of me. My paintings are about my past that I’m still discovering, and the trauma that my childhood produced. The color palette is playful and childlike, and is intended to make the viewer happy. One of my pieces is a grid of birthday cakes, neatly packaged, and seemingly peaceful. However, each cake represents a birthday that my birth mom wasn’t there. I want viewers to see the messy, broken, traumatic sides of saving a child. I begin my paintings by writing about a specific memory I have from growing up. Sometimes I’ll sketch it too. Then I try to come up with one word or feeling to describe the whole thing, and work off of that. I work in oil paint, but more specifically, super thick oil paint. I was a pastry chef for five years, so I work with paint like it’s frosting, just caked on. I use imagery that represents youth and innocence, and work in a rainbow pastel palette to capture the sweetness of childhood. My decision to use oil paint was based on its slow drying properties. It can take years to fully dry, if ever, which is representative of the healing process in adoptees. Everyone’s experience is different; some people are like acrylic paint and are complete almost immediately. But that’s not where I fall.
Frosted
The most important part of my art, to me, is the feeling you get from it. My process involves a lot of writing, and a lot of honesty. It’s easy to say you’re fine, and put up walls, but that’s what I’m trying to overcome in my paintings. We all have something major that has happened in our lives. Something that keeps you up at night, something that lurks in the back of your mind during happy times. I made this body of work because the major event in my life is being adopted. From the outside, adoption is beautiful, happy, and clean, like my work at first glance. But as you look closer, you notice things aren’t what they first seemed. Things are messy or missing, just like the pieces of me. My paintings are about my past that I’m still discovering, and the trauma that my childhood produced. The color palette is playful and childlike, and is intended to make the viewer happy. One of my pieces is a grid of birthday cakes, neatly packaged, and seemingly peaceful. However, each cake represents a birthday that my birth mom wasn’t there. I want viewers to see the messy, broken, traumatic sides of saving a child. I begin my paintings by writing about a specific memory I have from growing up. Sometimes I’ll sketch it too. Then I try to come up with one word or feeling to describe the whole thing, and work off of that. I work in oil paint, but more specifically, super thick oil paint. I was a pastry chef for five years, so I work with paint like it’s frosting, just caked on. I use imagery that represents youth and innocence, and work in a rainbow pastel palette to capture the sweetness of childhood. My decision to use oil paint was based on its slow drying properties. It can take years to fully dry, if ever, which is representative of the healing process in adoptees. Everyone’s experience is different; some people are like acrylic paint and are complete almost immediately. But that’s not where I fall.