Senior Art Exhibit 2006: Shannon Stuart

My first thoughts for this series were to create a representation of the human soul, personality, and essential nature through linear abstraction. I planned to use a variety of colors, textures and widths of line to portray vitality, affinities to elements, determination, emotions, and the many intricate links between the mind, body and soul.

As I worked on each piece, my focus shifted to the design and details of each piece: what color to highlight the corner, how to tie the disparate forms together, how that tricky new yellow would blend in the browns. The works evolved so quickly, with new depth and texture, new vitality. Yet I was afraid I had drifted far from my original purpose in creating them. Did these vivid and intricate pieces still contain the ideas I hoped to convey?

As I studied the finished works, I began to see that the themes I had intended to weave throughout each piece were not only still present but enhanced by my experimentation. While the earliest pieces convey the sense of one whole being, the later works focused on specific aspects and elements more of the mind than of the heart. The blocks are symbols of memory, tied together by the thin line of theme: an idea, a scent, a song. The drips that dissolve in them show the erosion of memory with time, blending and distorting events. The cut-away lines emerging from the white backgrounds are revelations of character, breaking though the masks people hide behind in their interactions with others.

The progression and transformation that shaped my art expresses the concepts of the variability and evolution of the mind far better than anything I could have rigidly planned. Even as I completed my final piece, I felt the potential for new expressions of this theme, which have informed clothing patterns and other sketches with the same persistent vitality as the threads of memory that these paintings portray.