Teacher Name: Elizabeth Drake
Grade: 12

Description: The plane within this piece is supposed to symbolize leaving home after finishing high school. An experience I’ve seen a lot is the concept of coming back home to a different place once you’ve been gone for a long time. This is what this peace is based on, the idea of leaving home. In my portfolio, I wanted to build a storyline so this piece acts sort of as the “call to adventure”.

Artist Statement: Throughout my senior year, I’ve been dealing with the fact that I’ll soon graduate and become an adult. Because of this a lot of my works have reflected the sentiment of “coming of age” or “growing up”. This is something to me, is hard to accept as it’s almost forced upon us as we are pushed through the school system to adulthood. I tend to use a lot of colors in my pieces and thought I could use them to my advantage by portraying spaces that would only be available to a child, while still showing cracks in this very facade. These cracks being the newfound logic and knowledge you gain as you grow up, as you understand more about the world, and because of this tend to get less beautiful. I try to show that childhood beauty through my pieces while also providing the feeling of nostalgia, of wanting to return to a place and not being able to. As an artist, I draw from these experiences whether purposeful or not. This helps me create a narrative through my pieces, something that the viewer can connect to.

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