Description
This painting is a patchwork of different photos and styles that I curated over my fourth year (year 10) fine art course. My goal was to make the piece register as one whole image, rather than a collage, and integrate all these contradictory aspects into a single scene. Much like how vastly different people can come together in society, and function as a whole.
However, humans usually have an aversion to what they deem different from themselves, hence why we tend to be friends with kindred spirits, and why cliques form. However, this also breeds ostracisation and closedmindedness, as we shy away from exploring new aspects of identity that we cannot learn on our own.
Because of this, I wanted to depict this piece through the eyes of someone who feels uncomfortable around those they consider unfamiliar or atypical. Hence, I made the image very dark, used colours that clashed, and mixed my paint with black, to make the whole thing quite ugly. Despite the unpleasant imagery, nothing bad actually happens in the painting. These vastly different people seem to be getting along quite well, even helping each other and having fun: the perceived ugliness is all in the viewer?s head.
Thus, this painting is encouragement for the viewer to allow themselves to be more eccentric, and not fear eccentricity in others, so that this mismatched world won’t seem so ugly.