In my work, my curiosity about both the good and bad aspects of human society, emotions, and behaviors has lead me to further expand the various symbolic layers behind each of my created works. By using cute imagery, I draw the viewer into a satirical world of candy-coated visual aids that my narratives depict. Using issues of humanity such as violence, sex, and survival in my work, various forms of communication are combined as the main tool in each piece. My newer work has expanded to include American popular culture as well as topics related to grotesque taboos, eroticism, symbolism, and human folly.
My art has been influenced for a long time by stories, ones that were read to me at a young age. My evolution of life experiences has influenced the way that these narrative stories work. For example, stories that have been told by my peers or events that influence these stories in everyday life find their way into my work. Emphasized through a dichotomy, my new narratives, "A to Z," are stories fictionalized through my reinterpretation of the issues of the adult narrative, which spells out the child by appearing to be appealing to children, but they have the underlying adult themes earlier described as grotesque, sexually explicate, and containing human folly.
As children we cannot wait to grow up. This is the type of subconscious voice I intended to use as an element in the work of my "A to Z" series of prints, but with the added element of an adult's satirical humor. In the work, I have continued to use bright colors, large page format, and cute, cartoony imagery to create a childlike dialect within an adult's world. The adult viewer is forced to see through the eyes of a child, and the memories of reading large pages should unfold metaphors and underlying symbolism. To communicate my concept to the viewer, I decided on work that deals specifically with " A to Z" and with numbers, because of the endless possibilities that stories and images can unfold in this context. Creating a mass collection of little bits (letters and numbers), I formed a collative body of work to complete my narratives into one whole story as a communication of "miscommunication" with language and image.
Communication is one basic human instinct, and it is through the writing of language that the advancement of societies occurs. And what better way to explore communication, printmaking, and image making than though the greatest of all learning tools, the alphabet and numbers? Three key features I find of interest in the alphabet are uniqueness, simplicity, and adaptability within each culture.
The idea of printed type lies in its practical imperfections, particularly since the graphical design of the alphabet has withstood many evolutions throughout its four thousand years. Yet the essence of the meaning of each letter or symbol stays the same. (Alpha beta, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1).
As children we sometimes cannot wait to get past our "first book" in order to explore the advanced readings of Shakespeare or other great novelists. But without this basic understanding, we would not move forward into the intellectual fields of study that advance society today. By including this basic tool of communication with printmaking, I have created art that explores a range of my ideas. Letters and numbers seem simple to adults, but for children this is a doorway to the beginning of gaining conceptual knowledge of how the symbols, communication, and narratives advance visual understandings of the alphabet and numbers. In order to explore the broad range of possibilities and how "A to Z" bridges the gap between child and adult, comparisons are made to other traditions of learning and representation.
The ideas behind language and letters can have many layers. What makes "a" stand for 'A,' and why does 'A' look the way it does? Why does the alphabet start with 'A' and end in 'Z?' Why does 'B' sound like ba or be or bee? What is the purpose of pronunciation? Why do different words in language change spellings when influenced by different contexts but are pronounced with the same sound (there, they're, their)? These questions would also be the same with numbers and statistical logic; for instance, formulas that are the same but have different applications with the same mathematical solution.
These questions are some of the things about the alphabet, numbers, and communication I have further explored in my work and that I clarify in this thesis. This series, "A to Z," is about the ABCs and probes deeper into the meaning of words, letters, sentences, images, and symbols by combining an adult sense of humor and a child's questioning nature, with the seriousness of the fine art of printmaking.