Social Issue - Jan. 2017
Project Five
“One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
“One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
ToxiCola
Pen and Colored Pencils
A Reflection Under the Sea
For this project I decided to follow a more abstract route since the common thread that I am implementing in the IB art show will most likely be abstraction. I feel like I have gotten very good at just drawing - not really thinking but just letting my subconscious do all the work for me. When I first started drawing the sea turtle I was planning on making it really realistic. As you can see, that didn't really happen. I got bored, so I went off on a tangent and added my own "perspective". This included the implementation of crazy lines and weird shapes in place of the realistic features of my reference photo.
I didn't necessarily use a particular artist for my inspiration but I suppose that Harry Yeff (Reeps One), the artist and beatboxer that was featured in my hero piece, indirectly influenced my work. I utilized his methods of abstraction, building off of the mentality I developed while creating the three pieces in my Beautiful Mind series.
It took me a while to even start this piece. First I planned on doing a series of pieces on mental illness, and then I planned on doing a single piece about alcoholism, and then I was going to a piece just on addiction, the it was going to be the treatment of the mentally ill, and then the stigma, and voilà ... ocean pollution. I decided that on Monday night, the week that the project was due. I decided to do Ocean pollution because in during freshman year I did a two piece abstract project on the same subject.
After that I started the project, admittedly while watching Netflix, but that's besides the point (I shamefully watched all four seasons of The Fosters in a week and a half). As I said before, original this piece was going to be really realistic. I wanted to "blow everyone's minds" with my "amazing" and "hyper-realistic" drawing skills *cough* that I don't have *cough*. But I got bored and started doing my own thing. I stopped looking at my reference photo and just went for it. On the left half of the piece I chose to go all out. I had a clearly outlined idea, but I ditched that and just drew because, well, I got bored. First, I added to soda bottles, hence the piece's name ToxiCola and drew randomly around them, the craziness and unknown nature of the lines and shapes representing pollution. Also, the soda bottles aren't really distinct which shows how many people don't realize that even the smallest forms of pollution can completely disrupt ecosystems. I used the color neon green to symbolize toxicity and the blue to represent the water. I purposely used more green than blue to show the vast extent of the pollution.
If I could do anything over I would have spent more time on the left half of the piece - basically everything that isn't the turtle. It don't think that it turned out horribly but I was on a sort of a time crunch and had to finish (this was at 1:00 a.m. the night before it was due). I think that I could have done better and added more detail in the lines and shapes. I would have also done a better job on the coloring but my green pencil broke so I couldn't fill in the sketchy parts.
Throughout all of the pieces I have done, there are two common threads. Not all, but many of my other pieces utilize abstract designs. Also, I drew all of my pieces (except for the photography series).