lonesome valley part 2

When I began this project, it was an opportunity for me to push myself beyond the boundaries of painting that I had grown accustomed to in my life. I have always been infatuated with the process of painting and the extreme relief that it gives me amidst the turmoil of my life. One thing that I have noticed about myself is that I find myself creating environments around me that are comfortable. Growing up I never found the comfort that I have found in my new life here. In this project I really wanted to explore how far I could take that reflex of mine. I took objects that I had acquired over time for my own space at home and altered them to fit how I needed in my own fictional environment. I suppose you could say that I escape into my paintings and I wanted to recreate that feeling in a space where the audience could experience that for themselves. The space that I chose for this piece is perfect for the installation because it is the space I use to paint in. Automatically, I have a connection emotionally to this area. It is a space that is charged with my creative energies and is very personal to me. The decision to sleep in the space was one that I made after the first critique that we had. I had begun the process of creating my space and was interested in pushing the experience further. The need to make these painted objects into something more than meaningful "objects" was interesting to me. I wanted to live the space I had created and spend a night contemplating why I had made the decisions I had made. When the time came I spent most of the night fuming around the barracks making decisions about what objects to use and how to place them in this 3D composition of sorts. I found myself dredging up interesting pieces of my past for inspiration. Certain symbols kept appearing in aesthetic choices and objects that I had collected in my lifetime. An example of this includes bird and cage imagery in the paintings as well as the objects that I had laying around my house, and the image of a cage-like house or home. The loneliness of the human existence has intrigued me very much. The Carter Family song "Lonesome Valley" has been a source of inspiration to me as well, because the lyrics are all about the lonely human condition. The feeling of being caged in ones own existence or reality has interested me very much and I see this entrapment appear often in my artwork. The experience of living in my art space is one that I feel was extremely helpful in the process of this piece. In the future I would very much like to sleep here again and keep a journal account of the experience and the process of building this "nest" of sorts. A journal would have worked better to draw in and control the audience in a way. I thought it was a successful piece for me personally, and I would hope that the audience could draw some sort of experience for themselves. I enjoyed this project the most of any this semester, because I put a lot of time and my heart into it. It was a great exploration of isolation of oneself in life and reality.