Justina Yu

Snap

"Snap": a multi-media piece for Figure Drawing.(Fall 2021)

“"Snap" explores an internal landscape familiar to many young adults in current society; this painting depicts a collective state of stress and pressure felt as a result of a fast-paced and competitive society. I aim to represent that “what am I doing with my life?” mindset and uncertainty, coupled with the feeling of drowning in, and holding onto emotions to the point of almost snapping, while still looking composed and productive to onlookers. I painted a human head in an illustrative style that is split in half, with three intense and almost skeletal figures in the middle to show a sense of weight, dread, and tension. These figures represent internal thoughts and/or states of being in young people I have discussed this topic with. I used acrylic paint for the illustrated character, matte acrylic medium and clear gesso to prime the surface in the middle of the piece, and then drew the figures with charcoal on top of the frosted surface. Like experimental film-maker and painter Shunsaku Hayashi, I use colour to evoke emotion; blue, despite being vibrant and bright, is used to create an artificial and haunted tone, while warmer orange/peach tones are used in the skin for contrast. The drastic contrast between the translucency of the substrate and the deep tones of the charcoal create a bridge between the two halves of the head, and ground the floating pieces. The above techniques (especially charcoal on translucent surface) were meant to emphasize the sense of weight and tension within my mental space and to show extreme contrast between internal and external appearances/environments. By researching artists such as Ed Pien, Shunsaku Hayashi, and Dana Schutz (to name a few), I was able to gain insight into how these artists depict a strong sense of emotion through their uses of colour and the figure. I wanted to focus on “my people” or a current situation/narrative as someone experiencing great amounts of pressure and stress, but still being expected to perform well. I chose to combine the more illustrative style with a slightly more traditional drawing style in order to show modern influences to my practice as well as to contextualize my own work within the modern art community, and to tie together the topic of an intimate mental space using a raw, bold, and traditional drawing that is reminiscent of my fine arts training and cultural heritage.”