I am a 21 year old artist who specializes in painting. I've been interested in art all of my life and began drawing from a very young age. I'm currently in my final year at the University of Worcester studying Art & Design and Psychology.
About me
As a young child I have always had an interest in and loved animals. I loved going to safari parks and farm parks so I could get close with the animals and learn about them. I always enjoyed drawing, as well as drawings of my family I would always draw animals, both domestic, safari and imaginary.
My love for animals has only strengthened as I've grown older. I became more interested in endangered species and what was causing them to become endangered.
PORTRAITS
Portraiture is something I have always enjoyed working with.
In school I worked with looking at beauty both past and present and how different these are through traditional painting compared with photographs of models.
I've also worked with emotion through portraits and how colour can have an effect on this. I've worked from my on photographs of people, applying colour more strongly and harshly to communicate emotion, such as reddened cheeks and darkened eyes.
My love for portraiture comes from its ability to communicate something about the individual portrayed in a less obvious way, through subtle additions or developments.
development of my current work
The body of work I'm currently working on is called 'Anatopism' which is defined as something being out of it's proper place or being place in a foreign environment. This body of work is a growing set of paintings which consists of an animal combined with a human object.
I create works to generate awareness around why animals are endangered and how they do have the capacity to feel, as humans do, yet are powerless to change their situations. I use painted portraits to anthropomorphise the feelings humans have towards animals, with these feelings and thought processes being influenced by the addition of a human object. The object choice is specific to the animal in the painting in order to represent what humans are doing to cause them to be endangered.
The empty backgrounds throughout my work allow for individual interpretation of what it could represent, the consistent use of an empty background further represents and supports the idea of anatopism.