My life through art

Art and me

In the country that I grew up in, everything is very academically focused, and it has always been expected from young ,for children to be academically driven, and studying was always prioritised over creative freedom in school. This was honestly difficult for me growing up as I never had a passion for sciences or maths, neither was I naturally good at it, or could get a grasp of it no matter how hard I tried ; and considering the academic structures of school, this was not to my advantage. Many adults did not understand my passion for art and why I couldn't just easily comply with the schooling structures. This was because my true passion has always been art. During geography, science or maths classes, I would always struggle to pay attention as I was always busy doodling all over my textbooks, and would often get caught by the teachers and then get told off in front of the whole class. I remember how I'd get so startled when the teacher would suddenly yell at me : "ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION"? .

This is what inspired the art piece above. It is a self portrait that I drew using Procreate.

My Life Through Art

I have always used art as a means to express myself. The image above is an acrylic painting I did back in 2010 when I was 9 years old. I painted this because I was pained by the loss of my pet hamster and the stray cat that I used to feed everyday after school. I wanted to paint the both of them meeting and becoming friends in heaven.

My Life Through Art

This is an acrylic painting that I did. This painting is about how it feels to dissociate. Water is a completely different medium to air. We experience life on land, but under water everything feels different as light and sound travel at a completely different speed. Sounds are distorted and light refracts, giving a completely different image to what is experienced on land. I got this idea from a memory I had from when I was a child, when I would go swimming in the communal swimming pool in my apartment on a crowded day. I'd hold my breath underwater for as long as I could and just listen to the noisy, distorted voices. The girl in the painting is disconnected from her sense of identity and feels as if she's being removed from the medium that she naturally exists in. She's looking at the darkest red flower which is a detached form of herself while the fish , which is also a detached form of herself, looks at her. This is to symbolise the feeling of being disconnected from your thoughts and sense of identity.