Aokigahara

This piece is from the spring of '10 and was my first attempt at total creative control. I don't do well without an assignment. If I'm given parameters, I can flourish within them, but when I have no limits, I'm just completely overwhelmed by possibility and nothing's ever good enough.

Over winter break I did research in order to have some idea of what I wanted to do for the class, and I read about a forest in Japan called Aokigahara, which is apparently the 2nd most popular place to commit suicide in the world, after the Golden Gate Bridge. There's even numerous signs in the forest urging people to reconsider and seek counseling, etc. This forest reminded me of the forest of suicides in The Divine Comedy, which led me to woodcuts depicting the forest of suicides. I basically just fell in love with the idea of depicting the human form as trees. Unfortunately this is pretty well-worn territory and usually executed in the same way (person standing vertically, arms raised and becoming branches). So then it was a matter of seeing people in sad, twisted trees and not having them up and down with arms raised, blah blah blah. This then led to hours upon hours of searching for good photo references and lots of frustrated sketching. Then the sketches look better than what ends up painted, cause I kill my work just a little bit when I paint it. I even did a color study that was really close to what I wanted, but then I basically disregarded it when I went to paint. So yeah, color's bad and forms aren't as good as they were intended to be. It's far from perfect, but it's at least getting closer to what's inside my twisted little heart of hearts.

Watercolor on cold press.