Project Two Artist Statement

The series of images I used are about how beauty can be found in someone’s eyes. It’s been the romantic punch line of centuries and will be so for years to come. You can learn so much about a person through their eyes, if they’re lying or telling the truth, or how much they have suffered through their life. For me personally, since I’m vision impaired, eyes are the one thing that I never really found important. People always say that the best thing to do darning a public speech is to make eye contact with each person in the room. But for someone who can’t see other’s eyes clearly at a far away distance, eyes never seemed important to make contact with. I did eyes because I wanted to show the importance of how our eyes tell about someone. Even if I can’t see them I wanted to make sure the audience could in this piece. Each face that the eyes belong to tell a story about that person, weather it be innocents of a baby or the immaturity of a teenager to the life story of an old man, our eyes can tell a lot about us.

The leaves in the piece represent natural beauty. Leafs are sorta like the eyes of Mother Nature. They’re always around us and change with the seasons Leafs start out strong and green during the summer, being there for bug life to feed off of. But by the time the winter comes along they turn colors, becoming older. You can see a leafs life story in the color of the leaf. The redder means its time is almost up, more yellow and it is just starting to mature. But by the time old man winter comes along, the leafs fall into mush. Then they return, reborn if you will in the, spring. Leafs are always around us. Trees need leafs to survive and we need trees to live.

My thought process was that some of the most beautiful things we will see in our life are eyes. Weather it be from friends or family. Also everything associated with eyes are beautiful such as crows feet. I chose the angles for the images by the comfort of the person who I was taking a picture of. It’s not a great idea to have a camera in front of newborns eyes. I honestly go scared of blinding someone with an accident press of the flash bottom on my camera. So instead of make the images all eyes I let the audience see some of these people’s faces/ I think this helped me in the long run because you got more sense of their story threw the parts of body language that you could see. When I got the leafs I decided that I wanted to keep that theme of not being so close to the leaf. This way the flow of the piece stayed the same. Though I do wish I had taken better images of the leafs where you could see the first one is suppose to be the green and fresh summer leaf, the second image is a transition of greens to yellows, and the last image is of a crumbling leaf. I also wanted the color in the piece to not drown out the eyes but make them pop out more to the audience. The other reason for the color was so that the piece didn’t become to “excited.” I wanted it to make the piece come together than make someone feel like the piece is angry.

Some formal elements of design I used in my piece where line and shape. The line and shape of each image and how they where placed matters on how the eye moves across the piece making a flow from the baby all the way to my grandpa. This also helps show a sense of time, young to old. I also created a focual point with the last image of the leaf. Your eye is drawn to that one the most. I did go in and play with color in each image, using a moncromtic sceme in all images though keeping both sets of images in the same color. I made sure to go and a play with the shading of lights and darks using the burn and dodge tool. I smudged some of the backgrounds in a few images because they’re where either other people in the background that needed to be removed or because the background looked beter with a blurred background.