Evaluation

Within Unit X I have been looking into Identity and what that means to me as a person, I have explored many different avenues within this unit and enjoyed where my work has taken me. I have developed and refined my drawing process; experimented with hand embroidery, digital printing and the Risograph machine. The under pinning theme of Identity really drove my interest with portraiture. What about a face captures our attention? What makes that person them?
I did this by studying people close to me, home or in studio. At first I would draw them until I was finished but as this process developed and I refined it I found when I challenged myself I had the best results. With this in mind I created a series of drawing configurations. Time was a tool I used along with, colour, reductionism and repetition. Within my drawings I try and capture more than just a visual representation, I use time as a limitation to my drawings and reductionism in the face. This means my pieces are not fully formed pictures but still translate aspect of the person within them. The aspects that are often most identifying about us often are over looked; they are subtle such as a face shape, or our brow line. Often less is more and we (the audience) fill in the blanks. I have developed a more in depth understanding of what it will be like to be a working artist with in my area of interest. Only recently has the word ‘illustration’ been used to describe my work. I envision my work in gallery spaces as large scale pieces that can be rearranged and made into something new. I like the idea of people interacting with my work as it is flexible and easy to manipulate, along with gallery spaces I am drawn to commercial use for my illustrations.

“The character of a face in a drawing does not depend on its various proportions but rather on the spiritual light that it reflects. It is true that two drawings of the same face can portray the same character, even though the proportions of the face may differ. No two leaves on a fig tree are the same, each has it’s own form. None the less, each one cries out: Fig tree.” - Henri Mattisse

This quote really resonates with me, Mattisse perfectly sums up what I am trying to convey through my work on portraiture and identity. I can draw the same person ten times over with different times restrains and each drawing will look different. They all stem from the same source, no matter how they differ; all hold a quality or essence of the person. 

Most importantly what I found out within my project is that our differences are what separate us and make us who we are, they are our likes dislikes, our individual identities.