My AP Studio Art Portfolio So Far
In AP Studio, you first start off for creating a question for your sustained investigation, which will lead your portfolio for the entire year.
Before taking this class, I knew I wanted to acknowledge mythology and the topic of love. However, I realized that creating a portfolio of 10 works around 1 mythological story would be difficult in terms of pacing and planning each individual work. So, I decided to focus more on love. I came to the conclusion that my question for my sustained investigation would be:
How do the different types of love (storge- familial love, philia – love of friends, eros – romantic love, philautia- self love) manifest themselves through hand actions?
Today, I’m going to introduce some of my works as well as the thought process behind them.
Sustained Piece #1: Remedy of Storge
In this piece, I wanted to highlight Storge, familial love. One of the most heartwarming things my mom does for me is give me fruit while I’m working on homework. I wanted to demonstrate the loving feeling this gives me by using bright and saturated colors for the fruit and her hands. I used charcoal for the background and the homework to highlight the brightness, and I also made the lines of the charcoal aspects messier to demonstrate a chaotic/overwhelmed state of mind. I used straight, clean lines to demonstrate a remedy to that state of mind with the fruit and hands.
Sustained Piece #2: Colored Music Train
In this piece, I wanted to highlight Philia, friendship love. I took the reference picture in Chicago on a trip with a couple of my friends. One of the most heartwarming things I do with my friends is physical touch, so I used this picture of our hands overlapping to demonstrate our love. In addition, to represent our differences, I put music sheets and a political article as their hands and my own hand as colored pencil (to represent my love for art) to demonstrate that despite our differences, our hands overlap. I used watercolor, colored pencils, and pens because colored pencils and pens are very saturated and bright. I wanted the hands to be more bright to represent joy. I also used watercolor because it blends well to symbolize how my friends and I blend together despite our differences.
Sustained Piece #3: A Helping Hand
My artwork relates to the inquiry because it pictures the media of my friends in AP Studio Art that are used in each of their sustained investigations. In a way, I believe being seated next to them has helped me develop more confidence in being more experimental with my art, which is why I chose to have a blank background to emphasize the hand I drew. For my hand, I chose to use graphite pencil because it was one of the most simple and basic media I work with. I wanted it to contrast against the uniqueness of my peers’ choices in media, such as magazine imagery or fabric. Each finger of my hand represents one friend: Quana is the thumb (magazine imagery), Emma is the pointer finger (print/ink), Claire is the middle finger (paint), Christina is the ring finger (colored pencil), and Anna is the pinky (fabric/lace). The media they use also extends to the palm of the hand, where they start to interact with each other, which was intended to symbolize how the love I feel from them as friends combine with my own heart, which thus, creates a sense of community where we embrace and love each other.
Sustained Piece #5: Apollo’s Finger
The artwork relates to the ideas behind the inquiry because the background with nature and the sunlight is supposed to be reminiscent of romanticism in art, highlighting the beauty of nature as well as Apollo, the god of the sun, because of the fact that the ring finger is known as the Apollo finger with connections to romantic love. To highlight this idea, I used lighter and more sunny paint near the actual finger. I also had two hands reaching towards each other to symbolize the eros (romantic) love. I chose paint to represent this concept because of its blendability and ability to make the art seem dream-like. I wanted it to be dream-like because Apollo himself is a God, so I wanted the audience to be immersed in a sort of unrealistic fantasy. To create this work, I knew I wanted to have more natural/yellow colors to show how Apollo is a god of the sun. I also wanted the piece to have a dreamy vibe, or to feel angelic overall, which is why I chose to paint the hands realistically but have the background nature be more blurred to symbolize how fantasy/mythology (Apollo) works in romance (Apollo finger).
I really enjoyed this blog as it went a little bit into your pathos of why you make art. To me, your art is quite the visual spectacle as the shading and the depth that is portrayed by highlighting the hands and the fruit in the first one, and the effort you went through to portray what your friends love. It’s very interesting to see the progression of your art too for it has a lotta heart. Out of curiosity, it seems you associate hands with love, as you mentioned you see touch as intimate, but you could have drawn a depiction of your friends helping you or hanging together, yet you chose to emphasize the hands, so why? The art was great and I hope to see more. Have a great day!
I think I chose to focus on the hands because I feel that people express unspoken feelings through actions, specifically hand actions/movements. I also enjoy drawing hands in general because of the amount of detail that goes into them. Thanks!