Seascape

Seascape

Seascape, collage  

Sadly I ruined the original. This was never meant to be a final piece, so I didn't treat it as such going into it. Glue stick and Bristol board is definitely not the weapon of choice for most artists making collage, with good reason. I won't into the gory details of its demise, but it was kind of like having an artistic miscarriage. Now the reference for my painting only exists as this iphone image (furthermore, this was pre-edit of adding a starfish and fixing up the center wave splash.)

I thought, still think, that collage is a good means for me to achieve the ultimate surrealistic end. So often I'll draw from my imagination because the things I envision either don't typically occur in real life or I'll probably never see with my own eyes and therefore cannot obtain the reference images. By creating a collage I have access to an array of visual information and control of the reference image that would eventually be rendered as a drawing or painting. Collage seems to be going the way of analog photography/film with the advent of Photoshop, but that's a little too much control of the image for this project.

Currently I am trying to explore anecdotal behaviors or interactions of humans and animals in order to portray them, as if to create evidence of these rarely documented interactions and bring validity and importance to otherwise unscientific data. While I believe in science (that's a broad term, but in this capacity I'm mostly referring to the sciences of sociobiology, behavior theory and what we perceive of certain species in general), I also believe that many anecdotal accounts are discounted while they very well may be completely true. And if it is said that "Psychologists have found that people are more likely to remember notable examples than typical examples."^[1] Well, then I'm sure that whatever account was experienced is just as, if not more "real"... at least to that person.

Alright, regardless: I promise to use good materials going forward and have invested in them for the next pieces.

[1] Gibson, Rhonda and Zillman, Dolf. (1994). Exaggerated Versus Representative Exemplification in News Reports: Perception of Issues and Personal Consequences. Communication Research, 21(5), pp. 603–624.