I would love to have a place to talk about nerves and put news and stuff out there. Here I go!
Oh boy! I am nervous. This was an intense and tedious process. I went into it thinking if I did not get into any of the schools I wanted, that I would
apply again over the next three years. I am beginning to doubt that notion now. People keep asking me what is the school I want to go to the most and my most recent response is, "the one that accepts me"!
I applied to:
RISD
MICA-Hoffberger and Low residency
YALE
Tyler
IUB
BU
You can view my work at www.orangetrousers.com
Excerpt from my artist statement:
My urge to paint is as strong as my instinct toeat. I have used painting as a way tounderstand my relationship with food and its power over me. My paintings arecovert reconstructions of past experiences, acted out and painted on canvas,like plays, but the characters are fruits and vegetables and the settings areplates and cutting boards. I use seeds, skin and juices as correlations betweenhumans and plants to demonstrate narrative. Concepts such as beauty as bait,the botany of desire and astrophysics inspire my work. Similarities betweenfood structures and astrophysical formations reoccur in my compositions as wellas a fascination with the surface and sub-surface of objects.
Icreate gigantic oozing imagery that embraces visual pleasure, but I embed itwith layers of personal, cultural, political, and scientific meaning. I see thetrait of beauty in food as a form of visual manipulation, like bait, pulling usin and making us want to eat its flesh. I strive to create imagery that canhave a poetic dialogue with a viewer over a lifetime, not just a complicatedmoment.
In Open Sourced Fica; Portrait of Evelyn Nesbit, I used a fig and honeyto depict ejaculation on the outside of the vagina, which has become a popular andfetishised ending in current mass-media pornographic video. The fly adds alayer of narrative, referencing the lost story of Evelyn Nesbit, and shows thecyclical life of physical beauty as bait. The Fig, or La Fica, is a reoccurringsymbol of femininity and is portrayed as a vagina in the narrative of mypaintings.
I amtorn between my loves for abstraction and realism. Scale allows me to embraceboth traditions. Up close, my marks are expressive and abstracted, but whenstanding further back my technique allows exploration of the observationalaspect of realism. I am interested in the large, dripping orifices in thedoughnut paintings by Emily Eveleth, massive realist portraits by Chuck Close,and satirical, master-influenced paintings by John Currin. All the while, in I’min love with Caravaggio, Matisse, Hans Hoffman, Vermeer, and Louise Bourgeois.