After transferring to the Fine Art program at Otis for a semester, I decided to take some time off from school to explore my artistic sensibilities. I started researching artists, and topics that I found interesting and collecting imagery.
After two years of over saturating myself with photography, film, literature, art, and the Internet, I then started to combine my interests to make drawings, paintings and collage work. I started by taking photos of friends of mine to serve as reference for the drawings, and then began to work again. Specifically, I began to create a group of work which focused on the BBW culture. I had no expectations or wants in starting this project, besides exploring a topic that I was interested in through drawing. It was also at this time that I felt like I was ready to return to school and complete my BFA. So with BBWs in hand I began my senior year at Otis, to explore the Big Ladies and beyond!
This Lady was the first Drawing that I attempted. She is approx 36"x60" in charcoal and a strip and dot of gouache.
Here's some of the others to follow:
While working on my senior thesis, I started to experiment with placing the figures in a space or grounding them in some sort of way. This is probably the point where I began my love affair with patterns and systems. I also began to play around with the use of color and different mediums in the drawings. Some were more successful than others, but I feel that I learned something new with each piece.
This was the first try. I didn't know what medium I wanted to use, so I tried a bunch: pencil, gouache, watercolor, charcoal, crayon and pen. And the result was a big 'ol mess. I really liked this pose so I redid this lady several times. (That's what she said.)
And the final one:
Here's another example of my obsessive nature. The first try I was attempting to expand on the idea of putting the figure in a space. The result was the background was too overwhelming and the figure gets lost in the space, so it was redone with a different background concept.
The final version:
Here's some of the other Ladies.
Here they are in the gallery space for my Senior show. They looked so much more majestic in my small studio space. :-(
