Hello everyone!
What a wonderful show opening it was! I had family and friends come to visit and it was an incredible experience and high! I heard there were hundreds of attendees which is incredibly exciting. I am honored I got to show in such a lovely space that Creative Pinellas provided. I had my own personal artist talk on June 10th and I am so grateful for those who made it out to see my talk.
I also finished another artist talk recently with one of the other grantees, Jenipher Chandley while moderated by the fabulous Babs Reingold.
In terms of my own personal talk, I prepared a 30-40 minute long powerpoint presentation of my work from the beginning and how its led to where it is now. I started talking about how I created a painting in undergrad of a woman eating a boiled egg in a bathtub(pictured below) and how that had led me to want to continue narrative portraits.
I spent alot of the time talking about my influences from Alice Neel, Italian tile paintings, portraiture, to traditional Virgin Mary paintings, to victorian photography (invisible mothers)
I then transitioned how these influences showed up in my work and how the work has changed meaning over time. For example when I used the plant Kudzu to cover my figures and symbolize security and freezing a past life in time.
Trauma from my own personal life circumstances shaped my figures into covered women with exposed body parts that were cropped and objectified. I talked about Gustave Corbet’s “Origin of the World” and how this shaped the body to become a still life.
During our group conversation with Jenipher and Babs Reingold, the questions were more focused on our personal process, how we go about art making, about letting go of work, and working in series or “one off” paintings.
I think me and Jenipher have different processes however I do think the incorporation and reflection of our female figure is very interesting. I really loved her work and even her cropped images of hands with flowers and nature. I wished we had touched more on to how we both incorporate what seems like Floridian nature into the body and what it means to be a woman painting ourselves and our own body.
The talk is posted on instagram as an instagram live, luckily we were prepared for the questions a bit beforehand so it wasn’t so daunting, but I would love to continue a longer talk next time! Check it out on Instagram!
