Blue Hour

Blue Hour Series

Prior to my graduate work, my paintings and drawings about the mind dealt primarily with representative imagery. The images that made up my portfolio before this program came into being after hours and hours of thought. They were illustrative looks at my mental states. I depicted mental landscapes, which were land masses that I created as metaphors for mental states. Each piece could be described as the distillation of my many, many thoughts. The images were not based on anything in reality, instead these images of landscapes were conjured up in my imagination and composed to fit the feeling I wanted to portray.
After working the first year of the graduate program on pieces that focused on my anxiety, I began to need a different type of outlet. Focusing on anxiety can create more anxiety and to counteract this, I tried to make work about the opposite feeling. Motivated to continue my process of observing specific emotions in my day, I started to recognize a time of day that brought a feeling of calm over me. Generally, I was at the studio on campus during the time the sun set. Right afterwards, the world outside was still light, but a blue hue seemed to wash over everything. The only items that were exempt from this blue wash were objects directly in the path of the streetlights. These sodium lamps radiated an orange glow, and this combined with the blue world created a beautiful scene. This time of day corresponded with a peaceful period for me and so I started to use these views to represent moments of calm in my life. I first used oil paint to create these pieces, and eventually found that using colored pencils on cold pressed watercolor paper offered more of a sense of light. This body of work was titled Blue Hour.
This method of using scenes from my everyday life would become an important part of my visual vernacular as I made work about other mental states.