Artist Biography
As an artist I’m drawn to visual storytelling through illustrations and character designs. I find the best stories and characters are the ones that people can relate to on some deeper level. By imbuing my characters with personalities and emotions that I have experienced personally, I am able to breathe life into them. The problems they face and the stories they tell may, on the surface, be fictional, but their inspiration comes from real life and my identity.
Throughout my life I’ve experimented with many different mediums and forms of artmaking. When I was introduced to digital art tools, something just clicked. While I enjoy traditional methods, like watercolor painting and charcoal drawing, I naturally gravitated towards digital tools and software for creating my art. My technique and my process as a digital artist is just as much part of my identity as the artwork’s subject matter.
In their textbook, “Themes Of Contemporary Art: Visual Art After 1980”, authors Jean Robertson and Craig McDaniel write that art students often “fervently believe that they want to find out who they are as unique individuals and convey this in their art.” One of my goals with this thesis has been for me to dive deeper into exploring who I am as an individual and how that influences my artwork.
Thesis Abstract
Advances in technology and the widespread accessibility to the internet has had a dramatic effect on society and culture across the globe. Since the 1980s, the contemporary art world has been exploring and embracing new forms of artmaking in this digital landscape. Digital technology and new media will never replace methods such as traditional painting or drawing. However, the digital world offers new, and oftentimes improved, avenues for artists to create and disseminate their work.
Two major themes throughout Contemporary art are technology and identity. Artists of this era are compelled to explore and express who they are as individuals through their unique visual voices. One way of doing this is through the use of new media. The internet and social media have had a dramatic effect on how content is communicated and consumed. Social networks like Facebook and Instagram rely heavily on visual language. It seems only natural that artists have flocked to the digital world to create and share their work.
The primary purpose of this thesis is to highlight the different ways digital technology is shaping artists and their identities in a positive way. It does so specifically through exemplifying how digital tools may be used in the artistic process, and how individual identity informs the artwork’s visual voice and content. The evolution of technology has reshaped the world, and the inevitable way forward for the Fine Arts community will be the melding of traditional and new digital media.