CPS All-City Visual Arts Exhibitions

Teacher Name: Ulises Rivero
Grade: Senior

Materials: Acrylic Paint, Graphite Pencil & Watercolor Paper
Dimensions: 10.5 in x 11 in
Description: This piece demonstrates my personal experiences with extremely low self-esteem, and constantly viewing myself as a burden due to my severe depression. I dealt with this for years without anyone around me ever noticing, or checking on me.

Artist Statement: My portfolio is centered around experimentation of different art mediums and expressing my struggles with mental illness through mixed media art. Between the ages of ten to fourteen years old, I had dealt with severe depression and suicidal thoughts. I had no sources of professional help to contact, I felt extremely burdensome whenever I spoke to friends about it, and I never felt safe explaining my struggles to my family since they never understood. As I grew older, I met people in my life that dealt with similar experiences, so now I continue to create pieces accurately depicting side effects of severe depression through my work. By demonstrating proper representation of mentally ill people and their silent struggles, I hope to spread positive awareness. Sharing the personal experiences of others and myself leads to a strong community that educates society on what to look out for, and how to approach their loved ones if they are dealing with depression or suicidal thoughts. It also creates a welcoming community for mentally ill people, filled with encouragement and reassuring reminders that they are never alone, or a burden to those around them. When developing my pieces, I really wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone, and I did so by experimenting with multiple art mediums. I tried working with watercolor, color pencils and acrylic paint on canvas. In the end, I found that working with graphite pencil and acrylic paint on watercolor paper helped me the most in composing my works. I began my artistic process by drawing self portraits with graphite pencil on watercolor paper. I took my time to accomplish realistic shading, as it would demonstrate my artistic skill. I then cut the self-portraits out and glued them to a second piece of watercolor paper, painted with acrylic paint. I layered my subjects onto the backgrounds since I wanted to achieve a three-dimensional look.