See the collection here.

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Transcript:

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Let's let's talk about Experiment 1 in Connections and Ways. This piece was kind of a mix of a few inspirations. There's an artist called Faith Evans-- Faith Evans Sills on Instagram that I follow. She does a lot of work with mandalas and gouache and watercolor. And this was also a return to something I did a few years ago where I kind of did art as therapy for myself where I sat down and I just I was only using watercolor and then making marks based on how I felt--like whatever my hand wanted to do--so if I was really anxious it might be a lot of short, quick, strokes and if I was feeling down and sad, they might be long slow strokes. Things like that--kind of more intuitive painting. So I wanted to make that with all of the materials that I've tried and that I have liked, while also playing with control and trusting my gut because I have spent a lot of time having a low self-esteem and not trusting my own thoughts about how things should look. So I really decided to challenge myself and go abstract because I'm not trying to copy anything so I can't look at my picture--like if it was a portrait I could look at a picture of the person I'm drawing and look at my drawing and compare them and see how similar they look and then I would know how successful I was. Doing abstract means I have to just make decisions based on what I like, what I don't like and if something is successful, based on how I wanted it to go down. So that was part of it. And I wanted to be able to use the couple of black pens that I really liked and my Posca paint fine liner pen in white.

And so I'd been thinking a while back of creating some sort of type of symbol system with different types of lines and shapes that would indicate different things and it was this whole concept of like if it's a solid line if you look at some of the cells (I'm going to call them cells in the drawings) --If there's a thick black line, that doesn't have a lot of permeability. Like if you think of it as a cell, that would be a cell wall that you couldn't just get anything through. And the lines that are dashed you can get a little bit through and the lines that are dotted you can get a lot more through and if circle is filled in well then it's just solid there's nothing going in or out because it's solid and like so you can kind of come up with what all of these things mean.

And then I started putting connections between them because I thought “well, If I make these a circle they're kind of like individuals--like cells--or like I could say represents a person and the walls that they have up and they can't really survive on their own and so they connect with others and they build these networks.

And so I started adding this into my art and it kind of looks like microbiology. I already know that wasn't necessarily the intention when I started and so I turned that language into kind of just a feature--something that I put in these pieces and you could possibly make a story about who all of these cells are and how their different collections of walls surrounding the center nucleus dictate what's different about each of their personalities and you can see who's connected to who and who's disconnected. So I started doing that. And I really liked how that worked. I also remembered an exercise--a watercolor exercise I learned when I was doing artist trading cards years ago. Where you paint a layer of a flat color and then you sketch out some shapes like leaves maybe and then you paint another layer of watercolor in all the in-between spaces between those leaves and then you just sketch out some more leaves and you keep doing that and it creates this depth and so I decided to try to do that with the mandalas and it ended up just being this really fun thing to do to paint this light wash circle and then give it detail and and it was fun to watch it emerge. 

So the base layer [of the piece as a whole] is just watercolors on wet paper and I don't have any control. I just put colors on there and see what they do and then I start gaining control as I put my washes down. But watercolor doesn't ever really go on perfectly smooth, at least the way I use it so there's still a little bit of lack of control and as I move upward from the base layer of paint I gain more and more and more control until I'm using pen and drawing these cells. The final layer is usually the gold. It's a gold ink, and that's kind of a --the level of control there is kind of variable based on the brush that I use. But I think it kind of breaks up the piece and creates  some interest. But, That's kind of where the experiments of this series started. It's from a lot of stuff in my artistic past and a lot of my art has always had a straight influence from my mental health and what I'm learning in therapy and all of that stuff.

So, I guess this collection is kind of about control and connection and trusting myself. And just trying to really be present and enjoy every step of the art making process. Like, I'm just doing the things that I really have liked over all of my experimenting the past few years doing art and I'm putting them or some of them together into a collection of watercolor paintings. And I really like them. They're meaningful to me and I think you could interpret them a lot of ways or not at all and they'd still just be a nice thing on your wall. Anyways. That's the Connections and Ways collection so far.

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