Teacher Name: Elizabeth Chisholm
Grade: 12
Materials: Digital Art
Artist Statement: This self portrait represents the loss and struggle that I faced after I experienced a house fire in November of 2023. I lost all of my belongings, my house, and most important of all, my three cats. Initially, I lost most of my motivation to create art because all of my supplies and previous works had been destroyed by the fire. However, my Advanced Placement Drawing class allowed me the opportunity to focus a series of pieces around this experience and to express my emotions about this dark time, which gave me the motivation to start making art again. I decided to make the piece to capture how, despite the bad things that happened to me (hence the dark void), I still have people around me who support and care about me (represented by the candle). I started my process by roughly sketching my intended design and playing with the proportions. Within that first day of sketching, I had already begun to apply paint. Over the span of about three weeks I experimented with color, shapes, and shading to capture the essence of the candle in my hand and the light bouncing off my face. I decided to use acrylic paints to complete this piece because I wanted to be able to blend and mix the exact colors that I wanted, while also leaving room for mark making, especially in the face. Overall, this piece is extremely important to me because it represents a time in my life where I was very vulnerable and unstable emotionally. I felt like I had nothing, that everything I had known in my 16 years of life had been stripped away from me. Looking back, I can recognize the support that I was provided with and how that helped me to grow, leading me to the title of this piece, Growth.
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