After finishing the painting of Damaris in her bedroom last weekend, I realized that I did not like the straight forwardness of the painting. Although the painting is in no way a reproduction of the photograph that Damaris took, it did not say anything that was not said in the photograph.
I called one of my closest friends and fellow painter, Alex Freeman, and asked him for advice on how to make the paintings about teen pregnancy move further away from reproduction (although still basing the paintings on photographs taken by the young women.) He brought up the fact that ever since I was fifteen, we’ve watched each other grow artistically for that long, I have always included personal symbolism in my paintings. They have always included symbols that show how I am experiencing the world that I reproducing, so that the paintings become as much about my experience of the subject matter as they are about the subject itself. I realized when he told me this, that my journal is still rich with such symbolism and interpretation but the paintings are not.
I decided to sit down and work on a painting based on the same photo I used for the last painting. This one is more in the style of my “bathtub” series that I worked on all last year- combining images from photographs and symbols that enter my journal.
I had scribbled into my journal
“Fetus in a womb like adult in a bathtub. Child in a bathtub like adult in the world. Pregnant Teenager?” I decided to move forward from there and work in some of the symbolism I’d developed in my journal. I also decided to use gel medium (a clear acrylic primer) to prepare the birch wood for painting on so that the wood could remain the background of the painting. Here is my experimental painting.
