ARTIST'S STATEMENT
Central Question
Are you, as a viewer encouraged to think critically about the role that female fairy tale archetypes play in women’s societal and political roles or in how women are viewed?
I seek to address this question by providing imagery that shows the prominent female fairy tale archetypes in a cyclical nature to indicate their impact on the character pictured in the portrait in addition to women in general. With visual media limited to the interpretation of its viewers, I am also including a description with the piece to ensure the audience has the proper context to understand the question I ask of them.
Literature
Of the several artists I drew inspiration from, the one I drew the most from was Alphonse Mucha and his art nouveau works, for both the frame and the stylistic choices regarding the clothing and posing. Because I created my own frame from a combination of elements present in Mucha's frames, my frame is unique to my project and each piece it is used in. The framework exists behind the figure of the portrait, with white space along the frame lines and windows that offer glimpses into the background behind the figure. Another artist I referenced was Lillian Liu, a fantasy photographer who's photography strongly resembles paintings. I was inspired by the fantastical outfits in her photography as well as the storytelling behind each of her images. While I had initially planned to incorporate more detail, I found that my time constraints only allowed for a certain amount of detail. In my future work on this project and the sister portraits I was unable to complete, I will be able to add that extra detail.
Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales serves as reference material in deciding which stories and female characters to portray in the portrait (Grimm et al 112). I did my own individual analysis of these stories putting to use my prior readings and previous opinions of these stories. Kirstina Reba Ouimet’s writing is another important source, as it introduced me to the cyclical idea of the beautiful fairy tale heroine potentially becoming a wicked female villain, or crone (1). That new concept helped me to further develop my own ideas for the project based around the archetypes of maid, matron, and crone. These archetypes will be represented in an analysis accompanying the simplified description of the tale itself, and the maiden archetype will be particularly emphasized through the visual exploration of the portrait.
Methods
Graphite is used to realistically render the figure of the figure with ink to lend darker value and shadow to true black areas of shading and white gel pen to add highlights to true white areas of shading. I also used micron pens to outline the frame of the piece. Rhinestones were also added to elevate the portraits into a 3-dimensional aspect.
As far as creative processes, I referred to the art of Nielsen and Liu and Mucha in order to create references that are effectively composites of various stylistic and technical aspects of my own ideas and ideas drawn from their work. As I worked, I found more aspects of others' art that appealed to me and sought to integrate them into my own work, not finalizing the framework until later in the semester, and drawing inspiration from ideas I had in a different course that unified into the concept for this project's frames.
Audience & Impact
Ideally my project would be for everyone, but with a specific focus on reaching women because of the
focus of the project being the representation of women in media, though I’d also hope to expand men’s
views on this representation too. The description that accompanies the portrait will help my audience to understand my thought process while creating the piece as well as my analysis of the tale the work is inspired by.
I hope that my project will have an impact on my audience’s understanding of female characters in fairy
tales, and how those archetypes can influence real world social and political ideals of women. I want to
spark a desire for change in my audience, a deeper understanding of how ingrained such archetypes are
in our society and how they work to divide women. Personally, I wanted this project to test my creative
abilities and encourage growth in both artistic skill and the depth of my art ideas. I feel that completing this project has achieved that goal and also helped me to develop myself as an artist and inform the way I plan to act as an artist in the future, both as a potential career path and within higher level art courses. Unfortunately, during this project, I found that it would be too difficult for me to be a double major in both Animal Science and Art, but my capstone has helped me see that I can gain more joy from projects that are all my own rather than projects completed for a course. I cut down on my original plans greatly throughout the course of the semester, due to a variety of circumstances, but even that compromising helped me to better understand myself and my values regarding my own art and the way I create it and assign value to it.
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References
Grimm, Jacob, et al. Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales. Translated by Margaret Hunt, San Diego, CA, United States, Canterbury Classics, 2011.​
Ouimet, Kirstina Reba. “A Grimm Reminder: Representations of Female Evil in the Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm.” UBC Open Collections, UBC Undergraduate Research, 2015.​
