At first, working from home can seem like quite a peaceful thing to experience, there's no travel, food is not far away and you can have your own schedule. However, working from home can be tough, there are no facilities, no clear work space and a lot less moving around.
Though these things have affected my work through these past few months, I have still been able to create a number of works that I am quite pleased with.
After completing my experimentation with house hold objects, I moved on to the subject on my own self-image during the pandemic and how it still controls my mind.
My first piece from this series was created out of coincidence, I had no expectations or aims when creating it. I started with the brightest background I could find, this was my way of showing how my mind felt at the time, overstimulated and almost blind due to the state of the world.
I thought a lot about what I wanted in this picture... then one day I just said "whatever" and painted myself. During that time, I couldn't stop my mind from scrutinizing myself, even though there was a global pandemic, it's still so important to me to look 'presentable'. The idea of beauty and the ideal body has been brainwashed and implanted into my mind so deep that even in such chaos, I still judge myself harshly.
After the body was painted I decided I wanted something to relate back to the state of the world, so I chose to include falling toilet rolls in the background. The purpose of this was to further push the idea that I was completely loosing my mind, every one of my senses had been devoured by the effects of COVID-19. This was also implied by the lack of feet in the image, instead black bars blur my feet from moving from this state of mind.
I Love how this painting turned out, the intense color of green background really affects the pink issue of the body as well as the toilet paper, almost like they are burning/ overheating. The carelessness of the form really captures this idea of being so consumed by self-image that nothing else can grab her attention, she is still locked to a phone, the one thing that connects her to the outside world.
I knew that as soon as I completed this painting, I wanted to make more. I truly enjoyed creating this piece, which was a big relief at the time as I had come to a stand still in my work. My favorite aspect of this piece of work is that it was an exact representation of my mind at that time, this piece is true, this was what my mind was like back then.
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