My concentration anthropomorphizes animals portraying experiences from and themes about our human existence. The animals act as a metaphor for human life to illuminate life lessons to viewers. They personify common human experiences and emotions to help viewers understand the messages I want to convey.
All of my pieces involve animals personifying humans and use different elements of design to create the appropriate tone for each piece’s message. One can group the messages of my pieces into two categories: encouraging and discouraging. Pieces 2 through 7 utilize a variety of techniques to evoke feelings of positivity and encourage the presented ideas. The use of gentle colors, form and texture creates a peaceful tone to encourage themes of leisure, play, celebration of others’ differences, and solidarity in one’s life (2, 4, 7, 5). The use of connected line and fluid and smooth forms creates a unified tone to encourage maintaining a connection to others and acting selflessly when helping a friend (4, 3). Pieces 8 through 12, in contrast, use the same techniques in different ways to evoke negative feelings and discourage certain traits and actions. The use of cluttered textures and exaggerated sizes, line and form creates a chaotic tone to discourage greed, sloth, and self-exaggeration (8, 9, 10+11). The use of rough textures, slumped forms, and cool color tones creates a depressed tone to discourage against the loss of childhood innocence (12). Each piece highlights a different element of design to vary the concentration while creating a similar theme of imaginative illustration of life lessons.