And now, for my Grand Finale…

Final major work for my Bachelor of Fine Arts

And now, for my Grand Finale… is a drawing project that explores the relationship between the artists personal interest in traditional and digital mediums and as the artists love letter to the digital media that has routinely inspired their traditional practice. The project explores the artists internal conflict felt over prior beliefs that their digital inspirations cannot overflow into their traditional practice and how fleeting these inspirations and motivations can be. This project explores these ideas through a practice heavily focused on process rather than final results.

Yoshitaka Amano’s early works for the video game series Final Fantasy and Abdelkader Benchamma’s large scale in situ works influenced the development of this project. Both artists use graphic line work and pay close attention to movement and composition, Amano’s early works use these techniques to create expressive renditions of character designs and world building concepts, while Benchamma uses these techniques to describe the relationship between our perception of our world around us and the incorporeal. Similarly, And now, for my Grand Finale… applies these techniques to explore the relationship between digital and traditional practices while conveying a deep appreciation for both.

This project uses printed images that vary from personal digital drawings to collected images from digital media that are transferred with acetone and painted over with watercolour and ink to create a flow of images that meld into one another, combining digital and traditional elements, bleeding them together to create an organic flow of movement within the work. Saturated colours were favoured to emphasize the appreciation for both mediums. Wet on wet, and wet on dry watercolour application and blotting drops of ink through the work was improvised and the inky tendrils that spread from image to image was a process that relied heavily on intuition, to create an honest and true depiction of the artists internal feelings and intentions and allowing the work the freedom to take shape in an organic way.