Artist Statement.

For the Color Trip assignment we will be writing a short artist statement about our Travel Posters.

What are artist statements?

Artist statements are short (generally one page) statements that cover the basics about your art, or a work of art you have created.  Some of the things you might want to include in your artist statement include.

WHY YOU MAKE YOUR ART, WHAT INSPIRES YOU TO MAKE IT, WHAT IT SIGNIFIES OR REPRESENTS, WHAT'S UNIQUE OR SPECIAL ABOUT HOW YOU MAKE IT, and briefly, WHAT IT MEANS TO YOU.  

Since these are probably things that you haven't considered so much at this point in your artistic career, we are going to start off slow.  YOU WILL WRITE many many artist statements while you are at MCA.  For this particular statement however, we will be writing about the travel poster. 

For the statement please include:

1. The destination that you picked. 
2. The subject matter that you have selected to use in your compositions to represent your space and possibly how you have arranged this subject matter (design)
3.  The color choices (color schemes) and the way you have used color to effectively convey this destination in your travel poster.   Here is an example from a previous semester:

Artist Statement: Color Trip, Destination South Korea

            Overall, my artwork always has something to do with the balance, sometimes lack thereof, between nature and technology.  In this assignment, I chose South Korea as my travel poster destination both because a large fraction of my family is Korean, and because through my knowledge of the country, I know it holds a wide range of sights, geography, and weather.  There are many sights and landmarks that are both natural and manmade, old and new, in South Korea from the multiple mountain ranges, including the Dinosaur Ridge (as is added in my composition), to more modern architecture, such as the famous N Tower which provides restaurant dining and aerial cable car viewing of Seoul (seen on the far right).  I wanted my main focus in the poster to be the East Palace from the Gyongbokgung Palace--perhaps the only thing that defines the destination as an Asian country.  In the end, I also added the national flower of South Korea, the hibiscus syriacus, because its topical air contrasts with that of the cool mountains.  Likewise, I chose a color scheme that would describe the bright, diverse array of culture that can be seen in South Korea today, and settled on warm versus cool colors (also inspired from the national flag which juxtaposes red and blue, two obvious displays of the temperature at near opposite sides of the color wheel).  Warmth is created by the natural red accents of the N Tower and painted woodwork of the East Palace, but also by a sunset behind the mountains and a mimicking reflection on the cobblestone yard in front of it, with the previously described hibiscus flowers' natural colors.  Every other color used is a prismatic or muted cool color, being mainly blue and blue greens (that of the mountains).  The mountains become a backdrop for the man-made buildings, which then become a backdrop for the hibiscus and gradient.