My finished pieces worked to combine the mind and different creative processes through my painting ability. For the most part these pieces are complete. There is one I will work on further. I am very happy with how the semester turned out. It was a hard semester that challenged me in more ways than I imaged, but it was all worth it. The ending result is not too far off what I proposed at the beginning. The main differences are the level of carving and dimensions for the paintings.

Musical Healing is a diptych painting placed side by side. The portrait is of my Father singing in the choir. He had a stroke a while back and it affected his ability to sing and talk. After a lot of singing practice he could heal both mentally and physically. His passion for singing was what drove him to get better. I wanted to capture that through my painting. Above the head of my Father are the veins in his neck with a small white clot showing where his stroke was. This portrait is paired with an encaustic abstract representation of the mind being taken over by a stroke. The white smoke like wax acts as a fog moving through the mind causing havoc. These two painting are the same dimension and displayed adjacent to one another.  This in my opinion was my most successful painting and it was also the last one I did. I think it being the last one to start I had gotten all the kinks out and learned how to portray what I wanted and how I wanted.

An Evening in the Woods and An Altered State, was a diptych but in the end, are stronger when they are displayed separately. This portrait is of Drew in the woods. The idea behind this portrait is the idea of meditation and how it can be done without being on a yoga mat. The definition of meditation is focusing on one point and clearing your mind everything else. That is what happens when Drew is hunting. His abstract painting is what I interpret occurring in the mind when someone has reached that enlightenment or altered state of mind. This abstract painting ended up not getting the point across that I was hoping. It seemed to have a lot of different ideas behind it that were not my intentions. I learned that when depicting something that is not actually visual to the eye, it can be hard to make that idea universally known to the audience. It is very important to somehow try to get that idea across in a universal way so that people can understand better and recognize what they are seeing. This painting taught me a lot throughout the semester about content, form, and the audience’s eye.

The diptych that did not get into the show was of my Mother in her classroom. This diptych did not get into the show. I plan on working further on this painting to try to work through the problems. I will make the children look more purposefully not detailed and make my mother more detailed. I think the idea behind it was strong but the execution was not done as well as it should have been. Creating a painting of my Mother in her classroom full of students was always the idea. I did not want the students to be as defined at my Mother, since she was the focus. Her teaching job is what keeps her mind going daily. It is what challenges her and drives her. I wanted to create an abstract painting that was an example of not only what goes through her mind as she teachers but what is going through the minds of the children in her classroom. I carved into the encaustic words and topics from her second grade syllabus. My idea was to draw the viewer in and make him or her read even on word. If someone is reading they can be learning and that was my point here. To make someone’s brain be active.

In all six of these paintings my purpose was to celebrate other’s ways of activating their minds through their own desired creative outlet. In doing so I was able to connect people close to me to my art. They were able to really get excited about not only my paintings but how I was painting and what the process is like. Drawing them close to the art world they typically do not encounter.