AUGUST ART CHALLENGE: what a palette holds
August Challenge
I took on commissions and I have been chipping away at them behind the scenes but, “what have I become?” This is what I am sure, you or an artist you know, has asked themselves often. Unfortunately commissions don’t offer much self reflection- I am telling other people’s stories. I was excited to see what chapter I am in though.
Life changes, our experiences start to add up and the equation is looking different. Having an over arching theme and voice in my work hasn’t always been easy. There is one concept I seem to have held onto throughout the years though and that is:
The mess that is happening in the sidelines of your life, is genuinely what we are comprised of.
This August I seized a wedding-less month to find a new voice and share the messy moments of my world with you. Read on to learn about all the elements of this body of work that make it so powerful:
MORE THAN JUST THE PAINTING:
There has been a calling for me to sell my palettes for a hot minute now. I give my palette that I use for wedding paintings to the client. It represents how life really is super messy and the only way that we make it beautiful is by pulling from the in between moments. Every fight, every long night, every birthday party, every boring night spent on the couch adds up to something bigger.
we are more than just a beautiful painting, we are the palette too!
it wasn’t sitting well with me to just paint on pallets though, I wanted there to be more meaning. So when I began this challenge I made the choice to paint from my actual life and sell the coinciding palettes with each piece.
NOT A PINTEREST WORLD:
we see a lot of artists pulling from references online. People who have never seen an octopus, are whipping out a masterpiece of an octopus on someone’s head.
I also have done this in the past, and I cannot say that I won’t do it again in the future. With my art history degree though I understand that experiences were much more limited in the past, the journey of an artist finding their voice took a lot of time and effort.
Now we can access so much on the Internet, and be inspired fairly quickly. I wanted to find the beauty in my own world though.
So for every prompt I searched my photos for something that inspired me in my walking life.
It adds another layer to this idea that we are more than just the painting, we are the palette, and we are also the moments. These are all moments from my world that shaped me in small ways. And I tried to paint the way those moments made me feel. Or access what I was going through at the time when I took the photo.
For example here you can see that I took a simple moth that I found on my door the morning of our first move together as a family years ago, and added potent lighting. At the time I took that photo it felt like we were finally at the end of a very long tunnel and this moth was a symbol of blessings to our new start. In hindsight I see now that we were only just entering a new darker tunnel. I wanted the lighting to feel highly contrasted to evoke the boldness of my naivety.
Another example is of this painting I did for ‘fragmented’. It’s such a simple image with cracks in the pavement, shadows that almost look like arrows, Beautiful wildflowers emerging in something hard and foreign.
I took this at the beginning of last summer when I was feeling very trapped in my life. I would take my children to the tennis court at our apartment complex every day just to let them blow off steam, and I took this photo because it just looked so simple and pretty. Looking back I did feel fragmented at the time, and I was also kind of like a wildflower pushing through and growing even though I felt trapped in my life by finances and parental obligations.
The shop update:
I plan to delve into each art piece in some profound way for all of you who decide to purchase an original. Whether that is me printing out the stories and sending them with the palettes and the paintings, or me writing a more detailed blog I don’t know yet. Either way I hope that these stories and this message resonate with you and make you think in someway! The drop will be on September 3rd at 6 pm and the secret code is PALLETTE10 for 10% off the total, valid that day only.
