Freestyle Academy proudly presents

Revulsion: A Junior Conceptual Project by Rohit Padmakumar (2015)

I am exploring disgust through the process of aging. When looking at my fine art mediums, you can see many leaves in a linear pattern in the background that oscillate between pointing up and down. These drawings were created by rubbing leaves on rice paper with pastels. Also, there are five fruits splattered with a variety of paints in which I simply took diverse fruits and splashed children’s paint on them. In terms of the digital mediums used, through scanning my images and using Adobe Photoshop, I was able to combine my various fine art mediums, starting with the leaves in the background. I then used the selection tool to crop out the individual fruits from the pictures I took of them, which allowed me to place the fruits in any order I wanted to. I then increased the saturation in each of the fruits, included a vignette, lowered the colors of the leaves, and put a filter on the piece.

The leaves in the background represent old age. The pastels make the leaves appear as if their broken and wrinkled, and desaturating the colors takes away their liveliness, creating the effect of them dying away in the wind. They also fluctuate in their direction to display that life has many ebbs and flows, making one’s journey to death not pleasant along the way since they must encounter many obstacles. As of the fruits, the variety of ripe and rotten fruits is to represent the variety of ages in people. The banana is clearly at the end of its life and is drenched in a black, depressing paint, while the strawberry is ripe in its ecstatic pool of bright green, juxtaposing the young and the old. The paint itself shows how these various ages view disgust. The colors of the paints aren’t exactly appealing and clash well with the objects they are on, such as the white rose, which represents rebirth, and the black splatter on it, which depicts revulsion. The splatters themselves also display that disgust is not a pleasant feeling, and thus can be thought of as a gunshot followed by a blood splatter which also correlates to death itself, creating an effective portrayal of my statement.
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