Synthesized Judgement (original)

Behind not caring, there are layers of care. The ballerina’s back is faced towards the viewer as she faces an audience in her world. I didn’t consciously plan this piece. It just happened as I successively selected cutouts from magazines that I cut out. It isn’t exactly William S. Burroughs’ cutup technique to poke into the unknown universe for inspiration because I allowed my conscious self to be a main part in the creative process. My muse guided me. 

This piece was me positively smashing through another long creative block. Creatively working through the vicissitudes of life, mean people, and one’s own unseen shadow can be a route to more creativity and growth. It looks like the ballerina is flipping off whoever is to her left as she walks forward. The manufactured flower is completely turned away from the ballerina. I wasn’t thinking about these psychological things when I was making the piece. 

The perspective leading off into an unseen horizon lining the top background of this illustration unifies the divergences in the foreground, thus suggesting peace. I created a major theme of stability because of the dominant horizontal lines composing the image, but inside that stability are imperfections creating dynamic qualities that cause interest for the viewer. 

I feel this is the most successful formal piece I have made since Foothill Neighborhood because I incorporated cutouts, acrylic washes, pen and ink, gauche, watercolor, and oil paint based transfer drawing techniques. This process used to be new to me, so I didn’t feel like I had a handle on it, but with this piece, I feel more confident in how I handled its outcome. 

I titled this piece Synthesized Judgement because I’ve been re-reading The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant lately, and he wrote about how our minds synthesize our worlds and the contents of our minds into a synthetic unity so that we understand things in an orderly way better. I took a creative route to illustrate what our minds do with this image because of the cutouts from magazines, the lines defining objects, people, and boundaries, and the colors adding degrees of intensity for character and variation.