The SECAC Chair for Life Disruptions as Opportunities for Artistic Growth, Session II was Stella Arbeláez Tascón who earned her Masters degree in Studio Art from the University of Central Florida. I attended the first session the previous day and learned so much about how artists live through seismic life changes and use that change to fuel their art.
Steven Pearson from McDaniel College gave a talk titled, Pandemic Pivot: Teaching, Practice, and a Return to Representation. My own art had gone through a huge pivot during the worst of the COVID pandemic, so this talk was high on my list of sessions I needed to attend.
Steven’s early work representational with splashes of abstraction mixed in. Someone reviewing his work wondered when the artist would take the dive and work purely in abstraction. That comment lead Steve to venture into the world of abstraction.
Then the Pandemic hit and he found himself isolated in the studio. He read a book that said and artist should focus on their environment. He started doing detailed depictions of his studio and domestic life. He did a detailed sketch of an interior wall and then would go outside and do a view of the same wall from outside. Abstraction was abandoned as he worked to truly document his surroundings.
The representational work grew larger and he used historical allegories to depict domestic life when his family moved to the suburbs. He noticed a neighbor obsessively mowed his lawn several times a week and so he depicted himself in battle as a weekend warrior. One painting depicted him going up a staircase on a mission with a vacuum to clean his son’s room. He loved the humor in the allegorical painting but his son didn’t appreciate it.
Steve had a triptych of three very large painting in the SECAC Juried Exhibition. All three depicted on scene of an above ground pool with a deck around it. In the first panel on the left the artist depicted himself blowing up an inner tube with a pile of inflated inner tubes beside him. The center panel depicted his daughter sitting on the deck with her legs out over the pool which was now covered. An inner tube which was inflated in the first panel came into this scene deflated. The right panel depicted his wife standing in a swimsuit straining leaves from the pool surface. This painting was done as the family was being pulled apart by divorce. The center panel felt lonely and desolate as the parents worked their separate chores far from each other.
Anna Vic Webb from the University of Central Florida gave a talk titled, Growing from Myself: Abstracting Self Portraiture as a New Framework of Visual Language for Abject Experiences and Ingrained Emotions. He talk was about what it is like to live with ADHD as an artist and how that framed her view of herself and the world. Many of her works are self portraits in a world that is distorted wit a fish eye perspective and vibrant colors. The eyes are often very expressive and piercing. In one she depicted herself seated on the floor holding her legs in a fetal position. Her concerned eyes were huge staring straight at the viewer. The hair on her legs became a vibrant expressive tangle. Creating with ADHD could feel fractured but it could also be a superpower as hyper focus leads to very productive periods of creation.
Having ADHD lead to periods of self-harm with chain smoking and putting herself in harmful situations. On painting showed her walking alone on a beach with blood red waves crashing on the shore. A full moon illuminated the scene and a shadow hinted that someone was about to block her way. There was a quiet menace to the scene.
What was most inspiring was how her art grew as she found new ways to live with and harness the power of having ADHD. The final piece that she showed was a huge departure from the other work. It still had vibrant colors, but the portrait was less warped and more polished. There are exciting possibilities as she continues to explore.
The final speaker was Kayla Lehman from Georgia Southern University, with her talk titled, Obsessive Compulsive Disruption: How OCD Has Impacted My Creative Practice. Kayla created a video game that depicted what it is like to get up pin the morning and find it impossible to get out the door while experiencing OCD.In the game the character went to the bathroom, and every task had to be obsessively scrutinized. The character would reach for a doorknob and then stop as multiple choices flashed up to once again wash hands or consider another task. Every task would have multiple choices about what should be done but ultimately there was no escape the character would never leave the room.
Her life impacted by OCD also lead to her creating a short CGI animated film. In the film people other than the lead character were depicted as having heads that were just an eyeball encased in black eye lids. The character had a dark cloud always on her shoulder which caused self doubt and an inability to find friends. Only when she realized that everyone else also had dark clouds did she begin to find friends. The clouds slowly became less opaque as she socialized.
The entire Life Disruptions as Opportunities for Artistic Growth session was so inspiring. All artists have their demons and need to find ways to silence doubts and create.