Shell Hunting Series Rethought

I participated in my 2nd art show locally: the 25th Annual Mollie Fear Art Show at Dare County Arts Council. This makes one for April 2022 at the 27th Annual Glenn Eure's Ghost Fleet Gallery Artist Self Portrait Art Show and then this one for May 2022. For this particular show I finished one of my painting from my shell hunting series. Previously I felt like it was done, but then as I've been reflecting and revisiting my artwork this past year, I've felt pulled to do a little more.

Above: What I mocked up when I was first trying to execute the Shell Series in 2020. These are the miniatures I had worked on which were pretty, but I fell like something was missing.

Below: Some larger paintings of shells that I enjoyed making and liked, but which again felt flat to me.

I realized that the feeling that something substantive was missing from the shell series was coming from an absence of something that has been playing on my conscious. Actually two somethings.

Pretty Things

One, I didn't want just pretty paintings, although I'd be thrilled to artfully execute them as I've seen other artist do so. It isn't a small thing. I still desire to compose beautiful art. But I also want my art to say a little something more, or a lot more. 

I am a nature and animal lover They are things since I was a child living on the marsh in Virginia Beach and running around the woods on some property my dad had in Skipwith, VA that has been a constant. When times were rough and people rougher, there was nature and animals.  And more often than not it is the subject of my artwork.

But with the love comes the concern for nature's and animal's well being. 

Larger Concerns

Pollution from runoff and drifting in the air as well as litter that blows and drifts in is both aesthetically annoying and in some cases a real threat to life. Anyone whos seen a closed beach sign or been told not to drink your tap water or who just gets mad when you are picking garbage up in your community knows that even if you aren't suffering from an oil slick or smog, trash and pollution are at the least, very least, an annoyance, a nuisance, as real as neighbors not picking up after their dogs. At worst, it could be causing major health problems. 

But I love nature, even with the nuisances. I'd rather be out in nature looking for flora and fauna than at a shopping mall or a big city. 

So while I have love and excitement from experiencing nature, there is the experience of litter and pollution. Trash. Big and small. 

And it was pointed out I'm using acrylics, which has a connection or correspondence  or correlation to single use plastics and microplastics.

Pretty Meaningful

So while my artwork is a pretty shell or a beautiful landscape, it is also communicating or relating concerns or anxieties about pollution, specifically about the plastics that don't just disappear and my concerns that recycling isn't a solution to our plastic problems.

I guess I will have more to say on the subject but I very much want my art to have layers of meaning, stories, and tension. And I'd like to have successfully crafted them so I can control the narrative to some degree without being heavy handed. I want some to even come to light for me when others notice things that maybe I was not fully aware of, those ah-ha moments.

 For now, this is what I'm thinking a feeling, as I'm trying to continue to grow and change as an artist, becoming more fully what I want to be.