The Nomad: A Mural Project
During my fall semester of 2020, I took an Expressive Drawing course. This course was designed to encourage us to be more expressive in the works we created, and how we can tie in personal narratives. Our projects inspired us to comment on current events, creating habits and rituals for art, and use our full-body movements to help curate our art.
This mural The Nomad evolved from a project I did during the semester. We had to do our performance-style art that would be presented to the class for our final critique. We watched videos of artists doing this type of work, whether they used their bodies or materials to create a large piece. These videos intrigued me and sparked some curiosity about approaching my project. When I did the previous mural in my dorm, I used 3 sheets of paper as my canvas. For the final, I wanted to do that on a larger scale.
METHODOLOGY
Throughout 2020, I found myself looking into a lot of Keith Haring. I wrote a paper about him for one of my classes and became fascinated by his art and activism. One thing I loved about Haring was that he never hesitated to shy away from a large canvas. That inspired me, along with African Patterns, Hieroglyphs, and everyday shapes to create my style of this doodle/mark-making type of art.
FINISHED ARTWORK
Throughout this piece, it tells a story of myself, just finding my way in the period of isolation from social media. The withdrawal from socials was a challenge at first, but after a while, I felt more freedom and an opportunity to express myself through my work. I surrounded myself with nature more, and even that served as an inspiration. I saw myself as a "Nomad"; a person traveling from place to place trying to find a place or a niche that I feel welcomed in. It gave a sense of wanderlust as I navigated from one corner to the other, depicting a visual representation of the path and the inner workings of my thoughts throughout this time. It became a very personal piece to me as I continued to paint on my wall. After finishing and looking back on this project, this ended up being one of my favorite artworks to date with how it came to fruition and the unrealized passion I had for doing this kind of medium.
