Illustrations

Last summer I worked for Bela-Fond charity and created illustrations for the their fairy-tale project. This one was for a tale called "The Moth and the Nightingale."

Here are some of my favorite ones that I made:

Spoiled brat Katya

Today I want to address the state of my emotional being. A lot of negativity has entered my life recently, and trying to deal with very separate negative issues is really hard, because as much as I am trying to stay positive and do all those things people tell you about being positive, happy and so on, it is quite overwhelming. It is overwhelming how much just piled up on me in the last couple of weeks, and instead of getting better it seems to only be getting worse.
When I was a kid I used to have these day dreams that I was actually a test subject for some crazy experiment on human life, and everyone around me was in on it, all except me. They all had specific roles to play in my life, and acted accordingly. When somebody was being mean to me, it was because it was required of them, and no matter how much I begged for softness and care, it was not to be given by that particular person because that is just their job, they don't actually care about my feelings. I am simply a test rat, and no matter how hurt I was inside, how much I felt like I was breaking, it didn't matter to anyone except as a result for their test.
I didn't really believe in this day dream but I would just sometimes think about it and imagine how truly horrible it would be if that was true.
I haven't thought this way since I was a little kid, even in my worst teenage years I did not think of my life in this way. Recently however this thought returned to me and now I am fighting the urge to believe in it.
Why? Because everything I really want to happen is not happening. Every person I want to impress with my artwork is not impressed. There is one side of people that keep telling me I am talented and awesome, and then there is another that doesn't care about my artwork, that hints at how truly shit it is, or just outright ignores my pleas for some feedback.
I feel like these people were told: get in two teams. One team will be overly nice to Katya, and the other will be horribly nasty. It's funny how I imagine myself "so important" (as someone told me one time about this theory of mine about the experiment; sort of like... stop thinking you're so special that everyone around you is watching you; that's not how I imagine it, in fact it's the opposite; yes, I am being watched, but for what purpose? to be a test rat, that's really low, lower than being just boring human). I imagine myself "so important" and yet so pathetic and useless. All my dreams that I have are laughable, minuscule. Kind of like "you make art? aww that's cute but so not serious". I feel like I am constantly fighting to be understood as being important, as being something solid. I feel that a lot of times I am just perceived as whatever, as if my art is a "hobby" and I am just lost trying to find something to occupy my life with.
The problem is I am not lost, I know exactly what I want to do with my life. But for some reason the majority of people perceive my plans as unimportant, as laughable, as stupid and naive. Perhaps they are naive but most people that have achieved what I want to achieve were also perceived that way. I don't know how the hell they dealt with it, except exasperation and excess. My hero is Van Gogh, and he had it rough, and he didn't really deal with it in a good way either. I don't want to be like him, but I want to be as great and as important as him.
Art is very subjective, but for some reason people like to objectify it. Oh you don't draw/paint people precisely as they are anatomically - that rules out any significance your piece has in the eyes of the majority. It's like we've traveled through 20th century modernism and we're still back to the core of how to paint realistically, how to render things realistically because that is still how most people judge art. That is so ridiculous and so narrow-minded, it makes me want to vomit.
I create things that I enjoy to look at. If I ever create something I don't like, it makes me feel as if my insides are being squeezed by an iron hand. I am so excited about my artwork, and I always want to share it with my friends, but it seems that nobody else cares at all. I invite people to come look at my stuff, but it's so hard to persuade anybody to waste 10 minutes of their day to look at my work. I want to cry about the state of the society I live in, where looking at art is almost as annoying and hard as writing a response paper for a class or doing a calculus test.
And this is where my other day dream comes in. In this dream I imagine as if I am the last human on earth. All the animals still exist, but everybody is gone, every single human being is gone from the earth. I learn to survive on my own, slowly but steadily. I usually have this day dream when I ride my bike for long periods of time. I ride through the green lush landscape, and the sun shines on me and makes me smile, and I look at the patterns the sun creates through the leaves and the trees, and it moves with the wind, the patterns move and the smell of the flowers mixes with the smell of spring that the wind brings. It's really wonderful, it's really beautiful, and I just want to freeze this moment because I don't want to go back to dealing with rejection, harshness, aggression, and everything else that humans bring. I know I am starting to sound like a neo-hippie-nihilist. I can't help it, this is what the world makes me feel right now.
Don't worry, I am hanging tough. I am a tough cookie... I can take it. I just don't want to, but we all know that what we want and what we get are star-years apart from each other. Ask me about my day dreams in twenty years, and I will probably still have the same ones.

totally new worlds

Following the last post, here is my newest art. This is a whole series of works called "Other Worlds". Here are the photos from my senior art exhibition at Illinois Wesleyan University.

Here is the concept:

The next two are the starting points for the series:

"We Bring Christianity to Another World"

"Baptism by Water"

The next eight are huge 4x8 wooden boards, all inter-related.

"I Can Walk on Water"

"Rebel in a Church"

"The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa"

"Baptism by Fire"

"Camus' Outsider"

"Lions' Den Survivors"

"The Skeptic And The Believer"

"The Good Samaritan"

And then I also made a sculpture piece in collaboration with Joe O'Brien. I made the sculpture and posed for the photos and he took the photos and developed and printed them. It's called "St Sebastian as a Woman"

There are also other paintings that I made for this series but did not put in the exhibition.

"A Planet of Dreams"

"Cosmic Vibrations"

"Negative Tension"

And finally, this is kind of a joke painting... I like to make things less serious sometimes. It's called "Adam and Eve enjoying some planets."

new art/old art

Today I am posting some of my art works. These are all part of the "bodies" series, done over the last year and a half, mostly since I've come back from London up until about mid-fall semester. The last three are from sophomore year but they are also some of my most favorites. All different sizes, some on wood and some on canvas.