My work commonly uses the symbolism behind recognizable motifs, animals, and plants to explore different notions and often mirrors a phase of my life. These paintings are a compilation of abstract and surreal portraits of different states of mind. This series is my last as a college student so I wanted it to be a homage to where I started this journey four years ago. When I first came to college, I wanted to be an art therapist. My first coherent series was a collection of reflective self-portraits that was focused on portraying and exploring the emotions I was experiencing during that time.
With this new series, I took the concept from my first series and expanded it to be universal and the figures to be more ambiguous. These new figures are inspired by the figurative abstract art of Richard Diebenkorn with his use of obscure faces. To tie in with my original career goal to be an art therapist, the different patterns and colors of the paintings are taken from suggested art therapy exercises.
Since the art therapy exercises are not the main focus of the series but merely a starting point of the painting, I tried to incorporate them into the paintings in subtle ways. For example, one exercise is to draw rainbows when sad so in Muted Rainbow I used every color of the rainbow. Another example would be when your confused an exercise is to draw mandalas. Our current times are confusing to say the least so this painting is to represent that. Behind the figure, I have a mandala that was once vibrant and spring colored and is now torn up and its colors are muted.
