Mod 13.2

Curation Journal

1. My main goal was to determine a theme. I started out by looking at some works I’d enjoyed during our Virtual Art Gallery Visit, and pondered on why I enjoyed them. I soon discovered that most of my favorite pieces were illuminated by light, and I was drawn to them for that reason. During this epidemic, one thing that has not been stripped from our normal lives is light. The power it has, both naturally and artificially, to set a mood, to give life to the earth, and to guide us when we are lost. Though the world has stopped, the sun still rises everyday. It provides a glowing view on all the little things that continue to bring joy into our upside down world. Without the sun, we’d change from humans, and we’d most certainly lose sight of what truly matters: the small joys, the little wonders that our world still offers us. It’s only recently that humanity has been gifted with enough time at home to recognize and admire the little beauties that can be found all around us. This world is full of pleasures, ones so simple that they’ve been neglected and ignored our entire busy lives, and we’ve only just scratched the surface. There is so much left to see, create and wonder, and it’s only made possible in the light. If there is anything good that has come from this pandemic, it is the privileged moments of leisure that engage us to surrender to the beauty in the world around us, and the acknowledgement that all people, beautiful and light, are essential. And I came to realize that this had to be my theme. An exploration into one of the finest and most peaceful things in our lives; sunlight. It is undying, and we must celebrate it. 

2. I choose paintings only. I did this because painting is a medium that allows us to tangibly explore light. It can express a plain white object with beauty and the pigments of an entire palette. We can observe light through the perspective of the artist’s eyes. We can physically see the workings of light as a rainbowed prism in the human mind. A mental acknowledgement of light turned into something physical through paint. It is something marvelous, that we can record, and study, and fall in love with, and connect over. It is AMAZING! I wanted this in my collection. This is how I chose the specific paintings. 

3. I centered all of my paintings because I wanted the FOCUS to be purely on them.  I wanted the viewer to be submerged in the atmosphere they created. I wanted the beauty of these works to be completely overwhelming, because as such simple subjects, it’s crucial to get lost in their appeal to truly appreciate them.

4. Descriptions are both formal and help tie pieces back into the theme.

5. Backgrounds are a grey to soothe the eye and allow it to absorb the colors that matter, the ones on the paintings.