Introductory Post

Hello! Well here I am again in the Spring taking Drawing III for the 3rd time. As far as formal introductions go, I'm Sarah Leslie, 21 years old and a senior here at Stout. I am a studio major with a concentration in drawing. My senior show will open March 20th in the student gallery and I will be graduating at the end of the semester. My current work has focused on animal breeding issues developing in the wild due to climate change. The pieces I will be showing in my senior exhibition present these concepts both imaginatively and representative of those cases occurring in nature.

I am eager to take this course as I feel like it will allow me to break out of the niche that I have been currently obsessing over for the past few semesters. I enjoy the content and it has great importance to me, but I am ready to take a step away and develop a new body of work. Last semester in Painting II I was able to meander from the subject of my senior show and produce work along a similar, but very different conceptual realm. I have continued to create work about animal issues, but I resolved the artistic concerns through abstraction instead of representation.

Sea World consists of 11 individual panels alternating red and white and enclosed in a gold, broken frame. The surface is textured with thick acrylic paint and a water pattern image emerges when the panels are arranged accordingly. The piece is a reflection of my experience watching The Cove and a message of awareness. The slaughter of 23,000 dolphins each year is the result of the human desire to watch animals perform and entertain. Dolphin trainers from aquariums, and marine parks around the world purchase their dolphins from The Cove in Taiji, Japan. After the selection, the remaining dolphins are inhumanely slaughtered, away from sight in the surrounding cove to be illegally sold as whale meat in Asia. Dolphin meat contains high levels of mercury, poisoning those who unknowingly eat it as whale meat.

The root of the problem comes from the entertainment side of the issue. A dolphin sold to a trainer sells for $150,000 compared to a profit of $600 for a dolphin sold for its meat. My piece highlights this notion of performing animals for entertainment purposes through the use of red and white to represent the stripes on a circus tent. The gold ornate frame also addresses the old world circus when paired with the red and white panels. The incorporation of red and white stripes maintains a strong connotation with the American Flag. The incorporation of red and white also refers to this concept since Americans were the first to promote the entertainment value of dolphins through the Flipper television series. The broken frame represents the enclosure of the trapping process and the confinement of a tank in captivity. The frame also acts as a metaphor for the life of an animal living in captivity that was taken from the wild. The water image is enclosed in the corners to represent captivity while the unenclosed sides speak about the endless depths of their natural habitat. I chose to light the piece in darkness with one direct spotlight to enhance the performance quality of the subject matter and the painted object itself. I have titled the work Sea World, in order to give the viewer a hint before diving into the concept behind the painting. The piece is my contribution to solving the problem. Awareness is the first step, and I urge viewers to avoid funding places like Sea World by refusing to attend the shows. The demand for dolphins will continue if we prolong the funding of animal exploiting facilities.

I was very pleased with the critique of the piece. The class gave me numerous conceptual realms to the work, and a few received the information exactly how I intended. It does not bother me that some people were unable to receive my message given that they may have been uneducated on the subject in the first place. I also feel like because of this I have done my job in some respects, since those who did not know the content right away were eventually informed. If I were to display this piece in a gallery the availability of an artist statement would also enhance the visual statement. I enjoyed making the final piece and I am very excited that it was well received. If I could go back and rework the painting with an endless amount of time and funds, I would love to create a wall size version as I think it would create a more powerful encounter with the work and the content. I also think the image of water would come across better. Overall, I enjoy that it fits the content of most of my other work and I am glad that I was able to contribute to helping the cause.