Elise Anderson
Progressive Disassociation
*FINALIST*
Since I began using art as a hobby, I have always loved to draw, paint, and evolve in art. The subject matter of most of my art has evolved a lot over the years, with me figuring out how to draw people much later than other living creatures. Seeing as my art practice is always growing and evolving, I would say most of my works as of the past couple years have been involving various distortions of the face and figure. I love pushing and pulling and multiplying and warping the face and seeing what I can achieve and create by doing so. I also love how you can contribute to so many ideas through such processes. I enjoy practicing new techniques, exploring new mediums, and pushing myself out of my comfort zone to create art in ways. I often use acrylic paints to create my works due to the freedom they allow. If I make a mistake, I can fix it, and there are so many opportunities to change the drawing itself or to layer and create complex images. I love looking at colors and trying to recreate them through paints. Even though I often find myself gravitating towards paints, I try to use various mediums, including colored pencils and the layering opportunities they provide, along with pencils and charcoal. I enjoy seeing the layer and pencil strokes through the work, which is something much easier to create with colored pencils as opposed to paints.
The creation of these portraits was to explore the concept of portraiture, and what makes a true portrait. In creating the piece, I looked at both cubism and more representational art before merging both ideas. In the middle portrait I used the idea of the face fragmenting into the many different views you think of when you think of the person, and the idea of conveying what it is you see in front of you from more realism and representationalism, and combined both ideas. The piece is overall a graduation from representationalism to abstraction.