My field of study for my honors thesis is Art, Drawing. My thesis is going to study the relationship between the human body and tattoos. I am interested in the idea of using the human figure as a canvas, and creating artwork that has an image within another image. I have always found tattoos to be very compelling. I am curious to discuss with people why they got them and the meaning behind them. My goal is to create between 8 to 10 original drawings or diptychs. These pieces will feature the human body drawn in black and white using charcoal, and the tattoos will be drawn with ink and include color. I will conduct research on this several ways. I have found people I know whom have different types of tattoos, and I have photographed them for photographic references to draw from. I will take pictures of about 10 to 15 different tattoos so I can have options and choose those that will work best. I then will interview the people I have photographed, asking them various question about their tattoo's meaning. I am also researching other artists who have used tattoos as a subject for their own work. I will find at least 5 artists who use tattoos in their own artwork and analyze and cite their work in my written assessment, as well as any other influences upon my work.

My work focuses on the themes of grief, closure, and celebration of life. Life is a catalyst both celebration and grief. Feeling joy when a life is introduced is as common as feeling pain when a life is lost. When I lost my maternal grandmother nearly a year ago, I felt grief accompanied with guilt. I never got a chance to say goodbye since we lived so far apart, her residing in the Philippines and me residing in the United States. In order to get rid of these negative emotions, I sought closure. I attended her funeral, and now I want to celebrate her life through my artwork.
My work comes in two parts: an illustration book titled The Butanding and an illustration exhibition. The book will be published through lulu.com and made available to the public. The exhibition component will be held from March 2nd to March 6th in Gallery 100 as part of my senior exhibition Post Pre-Production with six other colleagues in the School of Art. The illustration book is a narration of a little girl and her growing friendship with a whale shark. The overarching theme of the creative project is closure with the passing away of loved ones.
The Butanding is a narrative illustration book about a young girl befriending the local menace of her village, the whale shark. Similar to my own experience, the main subject—the young girl—of my narrative is shown suffering from grief and guilt over her grandmother’s death. My work illustrates a progression of the young girl’s emotional state as she goes on a journey with the whale shark or locally known in the Philippines as the “butanding”. It provides the scenario of a grieving individual who gets the chance to reconnect with a deceased loved one and rebuild relationships that were lost.

This project aims to help with the stigma and mystery surrounding mental health through the combination of art and psychology. The project was created by first interviewing individuals with different disorders and then researching the disorders further to acquire an accurate idea of the experiences of those afflicted. Then paintings were created to depict the emotions and struggles faced by individuals with psychological disorders. The project focusses on five different abnormal disorders: Major Depressive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, and Schizophrenia. These particular ailments were chosen because they include the main diagnoses that the average American thinks of when mental health is mentioned. My thesis contains interviews that I personally conducted, descriptions of the five disorders included, and artistic representations of those disorders in the form of oil paintings. It is my hope that this project will help unafflicted individuals to better understand others who live with abnormal psychological disorders, as well as help the afflicted see themselves represented in a way that they otherwise might not.

As am artist, I am primarily interested in the representation of the human form. I am most interested in self-portraiture, which serves as a tool to better understand my perception of myself and how it fluctuates based on context. Each self-portrait is indicative of my reactions to the world around me and also to dreams, by which I mean the involuntary experiences that occur while we sleep or are unaware of the physical world around us. I tend to take a Freudian approach to understand the concepts of the subconscious mind and dreams. I also use pattern and design elements in my work to serve backgrounds for my figures. These hold symbolic significance and illustrate the idea of using dreams as a source for my imagery.

Abstract Retrograde presents questions about the creation and value of art through a graphic novel. Materials used to create the work were illustration paper, ink, brushes, and printed screen tones. The piece was created in four stages: first, each panel was sketched into the first draft; second, the sketch was researched and fully developed into a complete drawing; third, the sketch was completely traced with ink and texture was added; finally, the drawing tones were added with ink and screen tones. The plot of Retrograde revolves around the protagonist, Vera, as she attempts to find a place for her art in an artistic community that rejects her for her lack of commercial success and for the advantages she got through connections. When Vera appears to have succeeded, a sudden plot twist reveals a conspiracy which undermines her success. By following Vera, the novel illustrates a corrupt artistic society in which the value of art is established by a small amount of artistic elites. The written portion of the project expounds on the various ideas that drove the novel, including how art forms like graphic novels come to be situated low in artistic hierarchies and how interpretations can be negatively guided by already established institutions. Among some of the theorists referenced within the paper are Walter Benjamin, Clement Greenberg, and Susan Sontag. In conclusion, the project illustrates an inclination to judge art by potential commercial value and by already established hierarchies, limiting the possibilities of new interpretations and shifts in those same hierarchies. Keywords: art, art theory, graphic novels