Preview
Creation Date
2021
Description
Materials: Charcoal on paper
Dimensions: 18 x 24 inches
Project Advisors: Tony Conrad
Year of Graduation: 2021
Medium
Drawing
Rights
Copyright for this work is held by the artist.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
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Artist Statement
Christianity is a broad topic, one that brings people together and also divides. In my series of charcoal drawings, and alongside my family, I have journeyed to embrace my religion with a specific flaw in mind. Historically, the Bible has been misinterpreted, and continues to be misinterpreted, to follow the white man’s Eurocentric narrative. In this, biblical women are often portrayed with a singular characteristic of submission that is used against women across the world, especially in church. Rather than focusing on the submission of women, I want to focus on the “what if’s” of human emotions that these biblical women dealt with and how they continue to relate to people in the 21st Century. With this in mind, I have created portraits of women that have made an impact in my daily life while relating them to women in the Bible, whose stories are more complex with varying feelings. Each portrait contains emotions that I and other women in my life have gone through, emotions of love, struggle, pride, and more. I decided to use charcoal for the dramatic effect it has especially when manipulating lighting. Ironically, I also used charcoal to emphasize how people often view the lessons of biblical stories as black and white, but that the characters have emotions that, like in the 21st century, are not described as such.