Runaway
Jacob L.
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My artwork is a mixed-media digital painting employing photography, ink-drawing, photo-editing, and digital painting. It is vague, composed in daub-like fragments, almost, that - together - manufacture my work. In composing this artwork, I intended for the obscurity of the viewer to remain, well, obscure. Due to the degree of abstraction, I don't wish to elaborate on how exactly I interpret my own artwork. Nonetheless, there are identifiable figures that are magnified in variance of color. For example, there seems to be a figure on the bottom-left side that, while seeping into the backdrop, also stands out from it. There is a broken-up, human-like silhouette spanning the length of the painting. There seems to be a surreal piece within the artwork itself; this artwork-within it feels as if it is, like the bottom-left figure, quietly seeping from the ink of the painting into the backdrop; there is also another painting situated to the side, seemingly revealing a museum-setting. Museums are the hubs in which art and viewers meet, despite the fact that there is only the one figure sitting (who could, perhaps, be the very viewer that reads this).
In the juxtaposition of the figure and the painting-within-painting, we notice that the sitting-figure seems to be looking at the painting. But the centerpiece, that which brings the piece together (for me, at least) - though vague - is the almost larger-than-life sense of the white silhouette; it seems to be running somewhere, but we do not know if backwards or forwards, as their feet seem to go in opposite directions; their limbs without delineation. They are situated within the length of the painting, pinning a similarly distorted shadow across the floor, and nearly breaking the meta-art suspension of disbelief by shining light on the paint-daubs and therefore, bringing awareness to the fact that the viewer is looking at a painting of another viewer, who too is looking at a painting.
The body of the silhouette is near the body of the painting; it feels as though it's either running towards it, or away from it. Whether this silhouette is the viewer of my (the artist's) work, me (the artist), the viewer of the painting-within-painting, or the artist of the painting-within-painting - always compelled by the division of art and the artist to run away from their work, but never wholly able to (is artist not inextricable from the art?) - or it all, whoever the silhouette and wherever they are going is unknown. Regardless, what they do is "shine light" on the deep-dark shadows that dog the piece; the silhouette illuminates the inner-working bits of the artwork as a whole, brings attention to the self-reflexive nature of everything within. An abstracted compound of identities, history, culture, intellect, and personhood intersects when the eye of the viewer, whoever it is, meets the eye of any artwork. Ultimately, this - this unique meeting-world of art - is what I wished to testify to in composing Runaway.
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I have felt significant confusion - distraught - with the world, and still often do. To interpret and make sense of the human condition and the world-round, I produce art, and therefore, birth meaning in the irrational.
