Repression
This series is about confronting emotions that have been repressed from traumatic experiences in my teenage years. Through my paintings, I hoped to confront these feelings to finally move on from them. My original approach to these paintings was to make a series consisting only of naturalistic figurative work, but I realized that this method lacked the emotional intensity that I wanted to show. Instead, I made four diptychs: one naturalistic painting matched with a raw, abstract painting. As this series is autobiographical, the figures are all self-portraits. To keep the exact meaning behind the paintings private and to avoid linear representations of the events, I used surrealist elements. These paintings revolve around the relationship of the figure to the bees. The raw emotion paintings were something I had never done before. In contrast to the technical approach of the naturalistic paintings, I got myself in the mindset of what each one meant, letting myself feel what I had been avoiding for so long, and saying a final goodbye to those memories and childhood emotions. The raw paintings are more about the cathartic process of painting rather than the final image. The contrast of the diptychs emphasizes an important part of this series; the naturalistic paintings show the logical, easier to look at version of repression, while the raw paintings show the unrefined, ugly emotion at the core of it all. The viewer can see what is on the surface and what has been hidden away for years.
