Have you ever seen a creator’s work and wondered how they arrived at using characters, styles, or themes? I’ve been sketching a lot since I have been home in quarantine and thought this might be a good time to reflect on why I create what I do, and talk a bit about my own themes. Because of my own feelings about making and the nature of working at the Center for Creativity, I continually see and incorporate new ideas into what I’m working on, and I experiment with different techniques, media, ideas, etc. But there are still concepts and symbols that tend to permeate my work. Frogs I only can guess how frogs have ended up in my work. I know it started in my 2D design course when we had to take an image from a magazine and play with patterns and colors around the image. I chose a Pacman frog. I have always had a strong affinity for water and swimming: I love beaches, pools, and lakes, and just walking near water. I also caught a lot of amphibians growing up. Around this time, I played Yu-Gi- Oh and had a frog-themed deck. Eventually, frogs turned into my avatars. Besides my liking of them, as a young gay person growing up in rural Pennsylvania, maybe I empathized with the narrative of the frog who becomes a prince as a metaphor for the way I, like many gay youth, felt awkward and out of place but eventually finds a community and grows out of that awkwardness. Crosshatching and bold lines My high school senior project was on documenting and talking about graffiti as art. Although I was never able to fully grasp graffiti style, I began using the bold style in my doodling. Because I was often doodling to alleviate stress and process thoughts, the repetitive and therapeutic use of crosshatching and simple line-making began to permeate my sketches, and in some classes like printmaking, this would be what I played with when learning techniques. Spirituality Although this is something that has become less overt in my work, I think it is important to talk about some of the spiritual symbols in my practice. I come from a family of pastors and identify as a spiritual agnostic. This developed into learning about themes and ideology of various religions in order to understand my own thoughts and beliefs. Because this development was happening while I was a student, some of the ideas that I have been fascinated with at one point or another have continued to influence my work. I often incorporate figures with no clear features or that are slightly amorphous. As opposed to the frog, where I am often drawing myself and my direct feelings in a moment, these figures are often reflections and meditations on thoughts. I often highlight a major chakra point or convey energy or spirit in these pieces in some way. Human experience and emotion is something I reflect on in pieces, frequently through shading or the cross-hatching in pieces. American society and gay culture also provide their own set of almost religious iconographies that are reinforced through collective experience. As someone in society who has a hand in upholding these, for better or worse, I also incorporate these into my work. If I don’t strongly oppose the icons, I use them without revealing whether I am doing it because I subscribe to them or am simply observing the way they influence others. These are a selection of my recent sketches since I have been in quarantine. I made these all before I wrote this piece, and they inspired me to reflect on a bit of why I was drawing in my current style. - Mike Campbell, Center for Creativity Assistant. Find more of Mike's work on Instagram.
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