Four Print

Mental Health and Mental Illness has attained a growing spotlight over the last few years. I do not aim to make mental illness ‘cute’ or ‘relatable’ as some other artists/companies do - I want to give an accurate representation to my personal experiences and struggles. When I was a teenager I was hospitalised with Anorexia Nervosa and a variety of anxiety and depression disorders. Years later, I still struggle with the remnants of my illness despite my overall ability to cope with my demons. My portrait series 'Left Over' is the personification of the thoughts and feelings that haunt my mind - good or bad...it depends on the day I choose to paint them. They are the Left Over feelings, using acrylic paints that are left over from years ago and have slowly congealed, dried out and separated. I use these materials as I feel they provide the appropriate difficulties and variations within them - some are stubborn and thick while others are runny a difficult to control. I chose portraits because I always felt that these struggles were the equivalent of having a crowd of people in my head arguing, and I wanted to put faces to them despite their ever-changing nature. The process itself often begins with photographic reference, but once I construct the basic bone structure of the face I let my imagination take over to a certain degree depending on my thoughts on where the piece is going at the time. After I finish my paintings in the ‘Left Over’ series, I often find a poem or song lyric that I feel is on the same wavelength as the piece. Often poets such as Sylvia Plath or Edgar Allan Poe are chosen. For ‘Four’ I chose the following poem segment: “Up from the vale my shadow climbs behind,” -John James Piatt, My Shadow's Stature My artwork has been inspired by the works of Alberto Giacometti, Vincent Van Gogh, Olivier de Sagazan, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud.