I would like you to consider how your own identity, background and personal history have shaped your values in art and art making. How does who you are affect what you respond to and what you make?
From my earliest experiences, I remember having a love of art, making, reading, and storytelling. My elementary school in Kansas did not have an art program, but my Kindergarten teacher did have an art center in her room. There were no instructions, just boxes and boxes of fabric and wallpaper scraps, yarn, paper, and a few scissors, crayons, and glue. I don't remember any artworks that I made, but I do remember the feeling of making in that space. When my siblings and I would play, we developed narratives, stories, and characters. It was all based around creativity and imagination, even if it wasn't specifically making art. My father was a photographer and always had a camera with him. He also liked to draw and would make little cartoons in our holiday cards. My first experience of art history was in my elementary TAG program. Our teacher did a unit on Impressionism, and for the first time I saw Mary Cassatt's work. I was so captivated by the richness of the colors and textures and by the people depicted in the paintings. Since then, Impressionism has always been my favorite art to look at. Now I realize, it has informed a lot of my own painting, which focuses on portrait, color, and texture. In high school, my biggest interest was trying to replicate the colors within skin, not just flesh-tone, but the the blues, purples, golds etc. The video on Kary James Marshall, gives me a new perspective on this time in my own work. For the last few years, I have rejected work from that time as being too focused on realism and lacking meaning. In the video where he talks about how to be able to get in the game, you have to be able to play like those at the highest level and the only way to do that is to "know what they know and do what they do." Looking at my work in that context helped me see it in a new light. I can see now how my love of the Impressionists and their technique with paint was coming through in my work. My first brush with contemporary art was in college, when Krit Streed showed us art21 during painting class. It was the first time I had experience artists as people and not as gods like was mentioned in the "Why are there no Great Women Artists?" article. I have found since, that I am maybe more interested in artists than I am in art. I prefer seeing work in articles, or in videos than in a museum or gallery, because I am really interested in the stories of the artists and how they bring their thoughts and investigations into their work, than I am in the work itself. I also enjoy finding art on The Jealous Curator and Colossal. I find that my taste leans toward, collage, layering, color, texture, and portraiture and these elements are the ones that carry through in my own work.
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AuthorMorgan Singleton is a secondary art educator with a Master's degree in art education. Archives
April 2017
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