Artist Statement

The importance of art in my life has changed dramatically since my childhood. As a child, I enjoyed comic books, cartoons, movies, and video games. I would come up with my own characters and stories, or simply reproduce the characters and stories that I liked. I did well in my art classes as I always strived to become a more technically proficient artist; one who could draw something perfectly from life or from memory. But even with this mindset I had a hard time picturing myself being a professional artist. Therefore I had separated that side of myself from what I felt like I had to become as I grew older and out of art. Fortunately, Choate expanded my opportunity to pursue art and see myself for the artist that I truly am. 

Over the course of my first two years at Choate, I took multiple studio arts classes which reignited my passion for art making. This led me to apply to Choate’s Arts Concentration program.  The program allows students dedicated studio time, space, and mentorship everyday after school. Following my acceptance into the Arts Concentration program, I began to develop my own unique artistic voice. 

Through my three years of working in the Visual Arts Concentration I was able to experiment and flourish, allowing myself find my style and observe its ever changing nature. I moved away from pencils and pens on paper and started using pastels, spray paints, pastes, and paints to create emotional works that I felt I absolutely needed to make. I explored emotion through exaggerated anatomy, facial expressions, proportions, shapes, and compositions.

Now as an upper level studio arts major with a concentration in oil painting at Colby College, I have further honed, through meaningful conversations with my professor, my inspirations and craft. My time at Colby has helped me discover my love for color and color theory. I now use my knowledge of color theory to create meaningful, intentional, and cinematic figurative paintings. Through further exploration of my childhood inspirations of movies, cartoons, comic books, and video games I have unearthed the connecting force that ties myself to my fascination with these types of media: the story of the hero. I find heroic mythology from all over the world, with its archetypes and symbolism, to be the driving force for the work that I now produce.

I now create my own stories using gesture, color, composition, powerful symbolism (religious or invented), light, and pattern to create cinematic set pieces of figure and color for my characters to exist within. With my exploration into my personal psychology and the mythologies of heroes I am finally satiating my childhood urge that I didn’t know existed: to create my own universe.