Emily Page Art
I have lost many friends and family in my life to various illnesses and accidents, and I had consistently avoided dealing in my artwork with the impact this has had on me. In college, I decided it was finally time to face these deaths directly and focus on how I had experienced each one. I feel as though I have a precarious hold on the lives around me and, in losing so many people, I feel as though I have gotten both closer to and farther from my friends (both those who are gone and those who are still here). The process of accepting and understanding what has happened has been vital in helping me become who I am. For my senior exhibition, I chose to mirror this process by working each canvas through many levels of painting, scraping, sanding and wiping. I applied the first layer of paint in the colors in which I think of each person. Then I covered it over with a layer of gray, representing the barrier that has now come between us. From this gray, I've sanded out the beginnings of a figure, and began to build many laters of paint that lead the viewer toward the figure and away from it. The colors depart drastically from the original layer to mirror the process by which our views change after a person dies: through talking to others about the person, you invariably learn more about them and it changes your perception of who the person was (bringing you both closer to and farther from the person, just as the viewer is pushed and pulled by the figure). I chose to build the canvases to my height because death can be so consuming to those left behind, but I made them no bigger because I have learned that I cannot allow loss to take over my life. After college, I have continued the series with another painting each time someone significant in my life dies. I have been both frustrated by each painting and fallen in love with each one. This body of work is both a tribute to the people I have lost and an examination of the strengths and weaknesses each death has brought me.
