WORKSHOP: The Shape of the Face with Emily Kwong

WORKSHOP

Workshop: The Shape of the Face

Join Emily Kwong for a discussion about her work, creative process, and an interactive learning experience to learn about facial proportions while creating your own 3D face mask constructed with recycled materials.

Sunday July 14 from 1:00 to 4:00 PM

FREE

About the artist:

My body of work originally began as an exploration into the human form. I wanted to improve my depictions of the human form, but then drew further away as I decided to base it more on emotion. My work bloomed into an exploration of this feeling of melancholy, a sadness without a cause. Using the human form and primary colors, I explored how we as people communicate in ways other than words, how our bodies can speak with as much volume as any crowd. Twisting into one another to try and tell eachother what we’re thinking without really saying anything.

Art can sing and cry in ways we find hard to do. In our lives today I find it difficult to really express what you’re feeling without fear of judgement. We are expected to be happy unless we have a reason to state otherwise, and if we do it had better be a good one. I just find it terrible that we can’t be honest with how we feel. Forcing ourselves to keep these emotions bottled up inside until they burst right back up as this sadness, anger, anxiety, depression. The list goes on, and I’ve found that happiness isn’t the cure for me.

With basic acrylic paints I go at it, try to follow that feeling I want to bring to the surface as fast as possible before it escapes. It gets a bit tricky because if I’m not fast enough sometimes the paint manages to dry so fast I lose the idea, and it gets frustrating. But it’s worth repainting if I must in order to create a piece that gets down to that core emotion. That melancholy that I’m after with so much more to give to it.

I want to see how far I can push my work, what I’ll have to give for the sake of conveying a feeling rather than outrighting stating the obvious. Whether  It’s something that I can achieve under the right circumstances, giving not only myself but my art 100%  of my time and effort in order to push the limits.