Shinhye Kwon: ProPrac Portfolio Fall 2017

Author/Artist Name

Shinhye KwonFollow

Files

Academic Level at Time of Creation

Senior

Date of Creation

Fall 12-6-2017

Artist Statement

Artist Statement Fall 2017

Shinhye Kwon

I want to make mundane, inconsequential things special through painting. Often, trivial things do not inspire people. However, I think this can change. The trivial parts of our daily experiences affect us unknowingly. If everything in the world were perfectly orderly and nonspecific, we would have had a boring and monotonous life. The specificity of the trivial parts provides us with fun, surprise, wonder, and curiosity. For example, tooth marks on top of a pencil, the top corner of the book is folded, or nails with a manicure peeled off can cause minor empathy and humor. I create works that reclaim the trivial details in life as important.

Contemporary painter Brent Payne is among the artist who are working on similar ideas as me. Brent Payne finds inspiration from his immediate environment. He mainly works by direct observation and focuses on traditional genres such as still life, scenery and portraits. When I look at his works, he paints the marginal features of his world delicately in his own colors. His painting, Reflections (2010) depicts a reflection of the bath curtain in the water inside of toilet. This viewpoint is normally considered unimportant, but Payne makes it interesting to look at. Causing this kind of shift in the viewer’s perception of the ordinary is what I am pursuing. Brett Amory, a contemporary artist who gained broad recognition for his series, Waiting, depicting anonymous commuters he encountered in urban settings, also inspires me. His works were lauded for psychological depth and representations of alienation in contemporary society. Brett takes photographs of awkward or alienated places and then paints on canvas. I also capture trivial moments from the photographs that I take and translate it into painting. I hope to go beyond capturing the trivial part like Brett, and bring out it’s meaning through painting.

The scale of my paintings will vary. For instance, small details like paint on fingernails will be drawn largely, and the reflected light will be drawn on small scale. People do not care much about the small and trivial areas, so the scale shift will heighten attention. And because there are so many trivial parts in the world, I plan to draw several drawings on a small canvas, too. The soft, flexible nature of oil paint allows me to capture small, delicate features in my environment. I use a relatively close viewpoint that encourages me to meditate on the tiny facets of the things I am painting in an effort to cause my viewers to reflect on them as well. I do this in hopes of encouraging people to notice the trivial things in their daily lives and find meaning in the little things around them.

Description

Also works are: Oil on Canvas or Oil on Wood Panel

Photo Credit

self

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Kwon, Shinhye, "Shinhye Kwon: ProPrac Portfolio Fall 2017" (2017). Professional Practices (ART 399). 27.
https://digitalcommons.murraystate.edu/art399/27