digital art final
emma mohs - fall 2024 - professor macko
'Year of the Tree'
Artist's Statement
I went on a hike the other day, and reflected:
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I am forgetting slowly, everything about myself and my life. Soon there will only be pictures, flashes of a face. Then later, only feelings, sensations that come seemingly out of nowhere, leaving even quicker than they arose. And then I will wonder about the time when things meant so much. What did I care about? Who did I love? I am becoming a tree.
Not a giving tree, a listening tree. I don’t have much to give. My bark is thin and my sap is dry. My needles fall out with the slightest gust of wind. Slowly I am solidifying, getting stiller every day. Taking it all in, the gossip and engines and shuffling hardening my bark. Until one day I will wake up in the middle of a vast thick forest, and for once in my life, I will exhale. I will invite the bugs back in.
When I am burnt out or uninspired, I drive to the mountains. Then I walk deep into the wilderness until I cannot hear any human noise. I find that my thoughts are clearer in nature and I can examine my life honestly, free of distraction. Looking for meaning, I also turn to poetry. For my final project, I wanted to combine these two things that help me reflect and connect with myself. When I am connected with myself, present, and aware of what I want, I am better able to connect with others.
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To make each image, I used acrylic marker paintings I had made over break and applied Photoshop filters like Pallete Knife and Grain to make them more painterly and nostalgic. I then selected the areas where I wanted to place each poem and wrote prompts in Adobe AI to generate black space there. For the font I chose "Apple Symbols" because I wanted the poems to be easy to read so as not to distract from their meaning. I also wanted it to match the modern art style of the background images, with a blueish-white color that parallels the trees.
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The poems I chose are all, in a way, related to human relationships with nature. Through poetry, we can tap into alternate knowledge systems, voices, experiences, and perspectives that differ from human ones. It allows us to speculate new possibilities by departing from reality and imagining new realms.
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