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About
I see this the second of my attempts in thought-provoking art centered around the mind and its limitations, trying to bring thought out to reality, and this piece itself is a demonstration of that. This time, I'm trying to communicate a feeling that I can't really describe well in a single way. This is my best try with getting that experience across, using a visual-lexical diad. The way I see this effort, the different means, methods, and languages in which humans can use to communicate thought can only assemble an idea so accurately. I'm constantly exploring more effective ways of communicating thought for others to experience with as little interference as possible, and in this one I took the concept that common experience is vital to fill in the incompleteness of such a representation of thought in reality.
Specifically, this piece was inspired from the experience of being troubled by that one thought that you can't put your finger on. One of the instances where it always happens to me is after the end of a school year or quarter where most of my daily responsibilities just vanishes. Being so used to having those responsibilities, suddenly not having them leaves this phantom yearning of still having them; at least that's how I understand it, I feel like it's way deeper than that. I've been experiencing this seemlingly foreign but familiar feeling since involuntarily becoming a slave to my assignments in middle school, but it's only last year once I'm in college that my cup overflowed. The statement I have written to pair with the visual sums up the general feeling pretty well:
"An imagination of being home yet unsettled, untethered yet restricted, grateful yet unsatisfied, comfortable yet in doubt. The day is ending when you still can't recall what it is you needed to do before it does. Shadows are growing but you aren't finding anything waiting to threaten you."
Personally, it's mainly the nearly familiar scene that emanates that feeling to me. It's like in the uncanny valley of landscapes. Purple is a calm but suspicious color. Everything seems right but also wrong, but nothing seems wrong either, but then not everything's right. I've dropped little hints of wrongness that I leave the viewer to figure out the meaning of: the weird thin piece of land extending from the middle to the left, the kind of wrong reflections on the water, the furthest mountain not having a proportional shade and the two furthest ones not even having a reflection on the water... it gives me the unsettling vibe I meant to go for, and I was hoping others would feel it too.
The Process
I actually started with a more normal palette for a landscape, lots of actually calm colors. Below you can see what I initially made in ibis Paint X.
From here is when I really thought: what can I do to make this innocent painting as subtly unsettling as possible? I used PicsArt for this second part of the process. I don't have the documentation of what I exactly did to the original form, but I remember adding an oil painting filter to smoothen lines out and blend some hard edges, a grit overlay to create that lethargic radiation effect, and of course a hard hue shift from light shades of jade to aggressive purples.
The Reflection
What I Learned
A lot of people commented that they were able to feel the feeling I'm talking about through the piece, and that they know what the feeling is. It reassures me that people can relate, and it fulfills one of my goals in visual art to find common ground for others and myself to stand on.
My Next Steps
I just want to do more of these representing-feelings-through-picture when I have free time; I haven't been giving my self a break for a while.