Cicely Mason Artistic Development Self Study of My Own Art Practices Autobiographic Paper

Introduction My development in art has been a long and arduous process. Different motivations and opportunities yielded artistic learning experiences that have helped to shape me into who I am today. Such a process was aided and guided by some very important influences who made a large impact in my life and my art. Art is Everywhere: The Early Years My first artistic experience that I can remember came in kindergarten. I walked in to the Art room for the first time and something bright caught my eye at the back of the room. The art teacher had painted a mural along the back wall and it looked like a sky with clouds. On it, the words Art is Everywhere were painted in white. I remember asking my mom what that meant when we got in the car to drive home that afternoon. She explained that everywhere around us you could see beauty, just like in art. That night I remember looking at everything and asking her if it was art. This is an artistic experience that I hold dear. Art as Motivation In the years to follow, I grew to love art. I wasnt as socially outgoing as my classmates, but art was where I felt accepted. In art class, my classmates loved and heralded me. They wanted to be just like me. They were jealous of my abilities and this made me feel very special. It motivated me to succeed in art. However, I was succeeding the wrong way. I wanted to draw what other liked. I remember drawing pictures of dinosaurs for a little boy that I wanted to like me. I do not remember having my own desires where art was concerned. In Artistic Perception as a Function of Learned Expectations, K.A. Hamblen states that art educators can facilitate

the learning of artistic expectations (Hamblen, 1984,p.25). I firmly believe that art educators do play an important role in the lives of their students, and in focusing and guiding their artwork. My development was guided by Dedra Davis. Mrs. Davis became my art teacher when I was in 3rd grade at Andrews Elementary School. She quickly realized that I was trying to please others and encouraged me to draw what I found special. While I do not still have my first drawing I created for her, I do remember it. My teacher prompted us to create a colored pencil drawing of our favorite animal in its habitat. Mine was of an alligator in the swamp. In O. Ivanshkevichs Drawing in Childrens Lives, it is stated that art is not imitation but the spontaneous expression of ideas (Ivashkevich, 2006, p.45). I knew exactly how I wanted my alligator to look. I wanted him to look like my pet alligator that I had when I was a small child and I wanted him to be living somewhere other than his aquarium, so he could be healthy and happy. I remember having those thoughts and for the first time feeling that I had made my own creative choices, my own spontaneous expression of ideas. Personal Inspiration For the next few years Mrs. Davis encouraged me to create things of importance. In Multiculturalism and the Tender Years: Big and Little Questions author E.M. Delacruz writes that each culture invents and preserves artistic traditions that represent that cultures important concerns about the meaning and the value of life (Delacruz, 1995, p.102). Children find such meaning in their surroundings, or things they are familiar with. When I was in the fourth grade, Mrs. Davis did a lesson with us on Van Gogh and his bedroom painting. We were to do home and observe our own bedrooms to draw. This was the first time I was asked to observe something before I drew it. I took great pride in sketching my room using details. This room was important to me because my parents had just remodeled our attic and this was my first room by myself. I was proud of this drawing. Mrs. Davis chose the drawing to represent our school at a student art show in Raleigh, NC. This was the first time my own art had been on display anywhere.

My Bedroom Pencil and chalk pastels 1992 Hamblen states that physical features, events, places, and activities of social importance were found to predominate in the subject matter of childrens art (Hamblen, 1984, p.25). Mrs. Davis encouraged me to reflect on things of importance to me in my own art. Learning to Draw Realistically When I left elementary school, I was disheartened that art was not offered in middle school. I still created art on my own, but worried that my own development would falter. During middle school I traced a lot. I discovered tracing paper and would trace my Teen and Seventeen magazines and would show my friends my art. I didnt think they realized that I was tracing. I longed to learn how to draw realistically, but didnt have the opportunity. When I entered high school, I had art, and Mrs. Davis was once again my teacher. One of the first things we did was spend time on drawing facial features and proportions. This experience allowed me the opportunity to be able to draw those models without the tracing paper. As I aged I longed to know more techniques that I could use in the creation of my own artwork. Mrs. Davis taught me

some techniques that helped to shape my own personal artistic style. She taught me a particular technique that I still utilize today in many of my artworks. I learned to dilute my paint with what to create drip patterns across my work. I loved the abstracted effect that it gave my art. I created several piece using the drip style. I had 6 pieces that were self portraits of myself at different stages in life. One of these pieces is featured below.

Splatters of Me Colored Ink, charcoal, water 1998

She also encouraged me to draw more from observation. I drew from still lifes, portraits of friends, and landscapes. These practices helped to develop my drawing skills and helped me to have a more realistic style to my own work. But I do believe that during this time I became more reliant upon seeing things to draw than simply drawing from my imagination. I have never completely broken this habit. Drawing from observation and still objects became something I did

daily and I enjoyed creating my own interesting compositions. One of my still life drawings was chosen to be in the regional student art exhibit. This gave me more confidence as an artist.

Ballet Still Life Conte crayon 1998 Illustrating In college I continued to develop my own style of art as I was introduced to many types of art and techniques that I had never encountered before. I was asked to copy works, and then transform them to make them my own, I was taught that there are other ways to shade than merely smudging your work, and I learned that art can be used to illustrate the thoughts of others as well as my own. My first drawing professor read us a poem titled When Gods Last Put out the Light was Spoken, and asked us to illustrate it. The idea of creating images to go with

beautiful and meaningful words excited me. I had already been begged to become a writer by a Creative Writing professor, and using my love for writing and art came natural to me and felt right. It was this prompt that led me to realize that I wanted to be a writer and illustrator some day.

When Gods Last Put Out the Light Conte crayon 2001 The Influence of Visual Culture on my Artwork In Art making in an age of visual culture: vision and visuality, it is stated that artists need to understand vision and visuality as it has emerged in contemporary visual culture and along with it the new consciousness that has unfolded with the exponential explosion of images (Walker, 2004, p.73). Visual culture highly transformed my own art as I got older. I was Influenced by images that I liked from movies that intrigued me especially. Walker goes on to state that there is a crisis of visual information and visual overload in the everyday (Walker, 2004, p.89). I was heavily influenced, even in to my adult years, by visual culture. In my series

titled The Extraordinary in the Ordinary, I visually referenced different popular movies. In the pieces Washing and Through a Mirror, I drew images of buildings seen in the popular sci-fi trilogy Star Wars. I loved star wars and emulated this in my series to suggest that I was dreaming about Star Wars while doing ordinary tasks.

Washing Conte Crayon, colored pencil 2003 Walker discusses visuality as the ceaseless production and circulation of mass-media images that virtually insures continued interaction between mass-media and art making practices (Walker, 2004, p.77). I find that when I do create art, I tend to draw what I know. This includes things around me, places special to me, people important to me, and images I am in contact with constantly. Another piece that I included in my series and was influenced by visuality was Small Light, which I derived from another favorite movie, Harry Potter. While I did get these ideas from visual culture, I turned them into my own concept and my own idea.

Small Light Conte crayon, colored pencil 2003 My current art practices have been heavily influenced by my artistic development and art educators from my past. I currently work mainly on my illustrations for my book. My undergraduate degree was in art education and my first graduate degree was in creative writing. I am still working on my first novel and have roughly over 375 pages. My illustrations are important to the book because they exhibit my characters as I imagined them! My characters exhibit my learned style over the years. I have shaded them using hatching and cross hatching lines and one of my main characters looks like a combination of several characters that I was introduced to through visual culture and movies. The culmination of experiences that I encountered while growing to become an artist is showing up in my illustrations for my book. there is a crisis of visual information and visual overload in the everyday (Walker, 2004, p.89).

Conclusion In conclusion, I believe that my personal artistic development has been aided by many different factors. Some of these include art educators that guided me in the direction that I needed to go with my art, the opportunity to make personal decisions based on what I enjoyed and was interested in, my own visual culture and images of interest around me, and the need to visually showcase my own stories. I am thankful for my developmental journey because it has led me to where I am today with my art, and I wouldnt change any part of my work today. I am happy with the type of art that I create today and it allows me to be creative in not one but two areas, writing and drawing.

References

Delacruz, E.M. (1995). Multiculturalism and the tender years: Big and little questions. In C.M. Thompson (Ed.), The Visual Arts and Early Childhood Learning (pp.101-106). Reston: National Art Education Association. Hamblen, K.A.(1984). Artistic perception as a function of learned expectations. Art Education, 37(3), 20-25. Ivashkevich, O. (2006). Drawing in childrens lives. In J. Fineberg (Ed.), When we were young: Perspectives on the art of the child (pp. 45-59).Los Angeles: University of California Press. Walker, S. (2004). Artmaking in an age of visual culture: vision and visuality. Visual Arts Research (2), 23-37.