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In this series I explore what it means to me to be adopted and how I look to define a home through an adopted perspective.

I chose to draw each piece upon a manila envelope to make my ‘home’ travel sized. A home to me has never been a structure or building to live in; it’s always been an emotion or feeling or moment in time. I wanted to push the narrative of each piece having this fluid movement throughout the composition to represent the vague yet specific boundaries a home has to me. Each piece ranges with bright/bold colors to show the versatility of an adoptive experience. By exploring visual abstraction in the series overall abstract, I hope to show the intangibility I have felt growing up to the present day.

In this series, I use manila envelopes. Each envelope has an underdrawing of text; a letter I wrote to myself exploring various aspects of my experience of what a home has been and currently is being defined as. Once I have finished writing each note, I loosely create an object, person, or place that fits under my definition of home with bright colored oil pastels. I start to make each image more and more abstract to the point where it can be hard to tell what the original drawing structure was, and then layer with drops of beeswax. I finish each envelope by inserting a personal pen drawing or note inside for only my eyes to remind me of what my homes are.

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My series explores a traumatic story. One that I have pushed down for a long time. Many of us find ourselves at odd and uncomfortable situations. Standing against the issues we face is essential. As much as I wanted to forget, there were always these little dark corners that I would sometimes drift back to. The hope I have for my series is to help others come to terms with the trauma they have faced, and to push past and grow. The uncanny and figurative expressionism, as well as surrealism captures the feelings I have found after years of repressing these memories. The way I feel I was able to just let my true feelings come out, was to set a couple rules.

Trust my intuition

Use unfamiliar color

Don’t be afraid to layer and build off the underdrawing

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My idea for this series of drawings is inspired by magic-realism. In the series, my underdrawings were established by spraying diluted acrylic paint over sticks, placed on top of blank paper. The sticks protect the paper from paint spray and create negative shapes of the precise outlines of each branch, which adds an element of realism to the imagery. I used collage and soft pastels to add over-drawings of unnameable and namable objects inspired or suggested by the underdrawings. One of the things that interested me in this series was raising questions about surrealism and abstraction. My interest in magic-realism is trying to couple those two concepts. Sticks are a hyper-realistic element in my drawing, which are placed in a space that is not quite real. Can magic-realism be the combination of real-life items and abstraction ways of depicting the world?

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My work is about a story:

Some golden fish are curious about the outside world. One of them jumps out of their tank and exchanges their body with a human being. However, when they get to their new environments, they find themselves hard to assimilate. As a result, they go to each other, exchange their bodies again and go back to their original environment.

I made up the story myself to reflect my experiences. After I came abroad to the States, I sometimes feel uncertain about what I am doing/saying to my surroundings, which makes me feel left out. As a result, in those cases, I will choose to go back to my comfort zone, which is staying with people who come from the same cultural background.

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Willa_Field_Broadway In Color_ Reneé Elise Goldberry

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Daveed Diggs

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Willa_Field_Broadway In color_ André De Shields

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My suit of drawings is inspired by striking a balance between the freedom of my inner child and the restraint that I have learned growing up. The underdrawing utilizes bold colors to connect with my inner child. The colors are blended intuitively, and I worked with both my fingers and a paintbrush. The medium I used, food coloring, is weird to work with and gets messy very easily. Throughout my suit, there is a recurring shape ― a white square, with crisp edges that I achieved by taping off the sides. This square represents thinking things through and controlling oneself. However, it can also represent feeling confined and not being able to “think outside the box.” The third and final element I incorporated into my suit were lines and shapes, drawn with white paint underneath the square but over the color. This element symbolizes the balance between the lively, colorful underdrawing and the smooth, clean square. All three of these elements work together to create my images, and reflect each stage or generation of the process, and I’m glad that I set these three boundaries because I don’t think the series would have been as strong without them.

Mia Vittimberga 10/13/20

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My “Broadway In Color” series is a suite of portrait drawings of people who are all of none European descent who have performed on Broadway—people who I personally admire. I discovered portrait drawing over five years ago and wanted to challenge the way I have become accustomed to working by exploring abstraction and using new materials. I poured resin in thin layers on top of drawings to create a more dimensional effect.  To pull each piece together into a series I gave myself a set of limitations and guidelines:

Balance the underdrawing to the painting portions where each is not taking up too much space

Each piece has a line drawing which compliments the portrait underneath

Every art piece has the same color scheme

Cover different areas of the piece with each new layer, to highlight the depth and dimension of the drawing below. To create unity between each one

Add quotes to each work that are iconic representations of the individual being depicted

Willa Field
Oct, 13, 2020

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This experimental series makes what would traditionally be backgrounds into subjects. The scenes also have aspects of magical realism.

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My work is inspired by memory. In these pieces I portray the process of remembering a place or moment that holds significance to me, inviting the viewer to feel as if they are in that process as well. I worked non objectively, trying to evoke a sense of distortion that comes with memory. Other than a paintbrush, I limited myself to tools that I had created from cardboard or paper. There are 4 layers of paint on each piece which I scratched down with sandpaper to reveal the layers underneath. I developed this process to support my concept of a layered memory. One of my limitations was that no color in the rainbow could be on the top layer of a piece. So all rainbow colors are underneath a layer of white paint and must bleed through to be seen. This creates an ethereal effect that immediately reminded me of memory and nostalgia. The representational parts of each piece are drawn from photographs taken by me or of me. I limited myself to places that hold personal significance, and places I have documented myself. Not all the drawings are easily recognized as what they are, but they are images that are clear to me. These renderings sometimes look as if they are beneath the abstract parts and sometimes as if they are floating on top. During the process of remembering sometimes a clear memory floats to the surface and sometimes you have to look underneath to find it. –Katie 10/13/20

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A moment from my summer trip to the Grand Canyon inspired my suite of drawings. I was on a little walking trail with my dad, though he was a few yards back. The sun was low in the sky: not so low that it dipped into sunset territory, but just enough that its light was a deep golden color — almost amber. Ahead, I saw this little thing curled up in the middle of the path. It looked like a small animal, or even an infant. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a knot of roots that had found its way to the surface, though to me it still looked awfully like a small human child petrified in wood.

This experience informs the content and general feeling I hope to evoke in my drawings. It's a feeling structured off of questions: What if it was a child I saw that day, a child of moss and roots bound to the path on which it slept? What if there are more beings like it — things that are unknowable and mysterious, sheltered in the forests just beyond our back door?

Zoe Davis 13 October 2020