About Liam

While my artworks are very different from each other in the sense of their style and content, several of them share many qualities, including dark and/or ironic themes found in all of my artworks besides “Waves.” I chose these artworks because they all featured some sort of juxtapositions or opposites. I struggled to make artworks early on in class, largely due to my own inability at several art forms. While I’m not bad at drawing, I struggle with shading. I also can’t paint, use charcoal, or sculpt well at all. Due to all these things, POSCA pens were the perfect choice for me to do art with, as they allow me to draw without losing the opaqueness of paint. I wanted my artworks to stick out in some way, almost as a compensation for many of my shortfalls in artistic skill, and in working towards this, improved my ability.

My first artwork, “Waves” is by far the most simple out of the bunch, featuring only abstract waves against a mustard colored sky. I tried to make as much of a definitive contrast between the complex waves and the simple, single-colored sky as possible. It started out as a sketch inspired by an article of clothing from a luxury brand, specifically a pair of Gucci sneakers I saw in an ad once. I realized how much I liked the piece after I finished the waves, and decided to create a contrast by painting the sky with a single warm color as opposed to the cold colors of the waves.

My second and third artworks, “WHAT THE DEAD DO AT DAYTIME” and “WHAT THE DEAD DO AT NIGHT!” are a set, with the former being Part 1, and the latter being Part 2. Despite this order, Part 2 was actually made first, and was inspired by a design in Warren Lotas’ “End of Days” collection featuring a Reaper (WL’s signature character) in front of a brick wall holding open a jacket to reveal several weapons, saying “Pick Your Poison”. This idea of the weapons and the “Pick Your Poison” translated over to my art style, in which I created a sort of skeletal vaquero as a character. The irony behind this can be found in the idea of a dead man selling the same items which sent him to his current fate, as seen with the hole in his head. Part 1 is based off of the Cal Neva Resort pool, which is directly on the border between Nevada and California. However, unlike the water and green landscape visible from the real life pool, I decided to move it back to a desert environment, so as to keep the theme of the American Southwest. A similar moment of irony is found in Part 1 as a different skeleton sunbathes next to the dry pool, sipping an iced tea which falls through his nonexistent esophagus. A firearm on the lounge table references a similar way of living to the skeleton in Part 2. The main juxtaposition comes from the idea that said “dead men’s” lifestyles from the grave are the same lifestyles that sent them there.

My final artwork, “Medusa” is different from all the other artworks I’ve done in the sense that it features nudity, it features a humanoid figure (that isn’t a skeleton), it features a historical/mythological figure, and especially because it features shading. This artwork is my first to ever feature shading, and I’m happy with the way the dot shading finally turned out. This artwork also features much more muted colors than the others, with silves being used only for eyes and small pieces of jewelry. The artwork is mainly black and white, with Medusa’s snake hair being the only other color, with a dark green. The juxtaposition of this artwork comes from combining the idea of what humans perceive as a modern view of beauty, with a Greek monster whose defining curse was the ability to turn whoever looked into stone. The hardest parts of this artwork were both proportions and trying to make her face as emotionless and cold as possible, to a point of being unsettling.

A final decision I made was to share the artworks in reverse order on my exhibition, so as to start with the most eye-catching artwork, again adding to the aforementioned irony within my Medusa artwork.