Identity

Today I question who I am as an artist vs. who I want to be. My head is cleaved with ideas I want to pursue and my shoulders weighed down in reality. There are a few things that I know to be true:

  • I get inspiration from literally everywhere. I want to capture the world with my eyes and hands.
  • I cannot create everything.
  • Yet I keep harvesting new inspirations from artists, my environment, online
  • In the future I will have limited space for creating works and storing them.
  • I get bored working in the same medium, I like to explore. I am compelled to.
  • I forget myself and try to make work that will please the world. When I do this I usually fail.
  • I am not a photographer, but I like to take digital photos.
  • I pay attention to textures.
  • I’m drawn to expressive works, but my work is highly controlled and representational.
  • Today I focus on wildlife in my work, but in the past I created emotional biographical works.

Corvid Study no. 1

Media I have worked in:

  • Photoshop
  • Digital photography
  • Acrylic Painting
  • Oil painting
  • Pencil
  • Ink
  • Alcohol ink
  • Up-cycled wood boxes
  • Found beach objects: flotsam mobile type works
  • Acrylic and alcohol ink on up-cycled windows/ canvas/ mixed-media
  • Block printing
  • Clay

Themes that interest me

  • Water
  • Places people leave behind
  • Death and our relationship to it
  • Archetypes
  • Symbolism
  • Patterns in nature
  • Birds
  • Cats
  • Up-cycling
  • Trees
  • Textures
  • Wabi Sabi

What I want:

  • Harvest new experiences and work them into a new body of work
  • Document the metamorphosis
  • Use media creatively, wisely and expressively
  • Narrow down my media choices
  • Find myself as an artist
  • Create fine art, but still have it accessible to a wide range of people.

I am overwhelmed by all the possible ways I could make art. My brain is drowning in ideas and I am paralyzed by choices. The more cerebral I get about the task at hand the more paralyzed and indecisive I am.

Who am I? And what is my art about?

Updated September 13, 2022

One Comment

  1. Ruby

    I have long periods of feeling very much like this. Especially with the move. Having limited space for work and storage truncated my practice a LOT. But…. the limiting factors sort of put me back in touch with drawing and watercolor in a way that’s been valuable. So, in that way that’s good design always has limits…

Leave a Reply to RubyCancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Oops! That’s mine. All images on this site belong to Taryn Okesson©️

0