What's Under My Bed?
What do you see in your dreams? I can't remember the last time I had a happy dream or even one…
How can I explain what insomnia feels like? A cage? A bed? A prison? The idea of sleep scares me, it's hard to explain, so I did it through my art. Non-binary characters in dark scenes portray colors, images, and symbols of an inner conflict. A vital symbol that appears in almost all pieces are rosary beads. This is a metaphor for sleeping medications or antidepressants often given to insomniacs. I've had insomnia virtually all my life and remember the desperation for a solution to my problem, the rosary beads.
My series titled "The Monsters Under My Bed" aims to convey the mood and tones of gloominess, sleepiness, and sadness associated with my experiences of insomnia. The concept is informed by personal experience and the style developed from sketchbook experiments with black India ink, neutralized colors, and various types of cool grey tones. These are unusual colors for my work; however, as I began to create my first pieces, I became bolder in experimenting with high contrast colors and values to enhance mood and emotional impact. For example, with my piece "Bleak Blankets", I went outside of my comfort zone and used highly contrasting colors such as white and black to add details to the background to emphasize a creepy mood. I also experiment with the placement of figures to create a sense of imagined space and the illusion of a three-dimensional plane. By placing figures behind objects or having different light sources, I enhanced my work quality.
To continue expressing these grim imagined realities, I delved into playing with the dark tones and changing the color of the light source into hues of blue, purple, and dark pink. Along with continuously altering the light sources, I am consistently adding patterns and details to my pieces' backgrounds to add hidden meaning enhance the surreal and dream-like quality. I intend to create a world filled with fantasy and mental instability. I aspire to create surreal scenes and spreading the idea of "getting lost" within our dreams and ourselves and how that links to insomnia.
How can I explain what insomnia feels like? A cage? A bed? A prison? The idea of sleep scares me, it's hard to explain, so I did it through my art. Non-binary characters in dark scenes portray colors, images, and symbols of an inner conflict. A vital symbol that appears in almost all pieces are rosary beads. This is a metaphor for sleeping medications or antidepressants often given to insomniacs. I've had insomnia virtually all my life and remember the desperation for a solution to my problem, the rosary beads.
My series titled "The Monsters Under My Bed" aims to convey the mood and tones of gloominess, sleepiness, and sadness associated with my experiences of insomnia. The concept is informed by personal experience and the style developed from sketchbook experiments with black India ink, neutralized colors, and various types of cool grey tones. These are unusual colors for my work; however, as I began to create my first pieces, I became bolder in experimenting with high contrast colors and values to enhance mood and emotional impact. For example, with my piece "Bleak Blankets", I went outside of my comfort zone and used highly contrasting colors such as white and black to add details to the background to emphasize a creepy mood. I also experiment with the placement of figures to create a sense of imagined space and the illusion of a three-dimensional plane. By placing figures behind objects or having different light sources, I enhanced my work quality.
To continue expressing these grim imagined realities, I delved into playing with the dark tones and changing the color of the light source into hues of blue, purple, and dark pink. Along with continuously altering the light sources, I am consistently adding patterns and details to my pieces' backgrounds to add hidden meaning enhance the surreal and dream-like quality. I intend to create a world filled with fantasy and mental instability. I aspire to create surreal scenes and spreading the idea of "getting lost" within our dreams and ourselves and how that links to insomnia.