Freestyle Academy proudly presents

Visage: A Junior Self-Portrait Illustration by Anna Wang (2013)

There is a central image that I keep returning to in my essay, a mountainous place I visited once, and that image is what inspired this illustration. Standing atop a cliff and looking out over an entire mountain range that seemed to sprawl out into the universe has had a huge impact on the way I view life. That one moment still affects my artwork and my vision of the world around me. There is a description in the beginning and conclusion of my essay describing how this place has become a part of me, how standing there, I felt a connection between the earth beneath me and the inner corners of my mind. That connection and journey is what drives this piece of work.

Because my surroundings affect my way of thinking which shows through in my art, as you travel farther up the page, you being to see the landscape transforming from geometric shapes into more loosed and abstract brushstrokes. My art transports me to another world, and sets me free by putting my everyday experiences on hold, shut off in another corner of my brain. To display this feeling of escape, the black strokes of the top layer of mountains turn into birds in a way who fly off up into the top of the illustration. The entire piece is dreamlike and surrealistic, which is supposed to reflect the inside my head. The three mountains at the base symbolize the real world that I see all around me while the second layer represents my view of that same world but skewed by my art which acts as a sort of filter, twisting everything I perceive. The third level, the space and the birds, are symbols of freedom and escape and in this context they are representations of my transportation to an ethereal world in my head. The triad of levels in my illustration portrays the journey from earthly and physical to spiritual and imaginative. Similarly the reason for the mountains to be grouped in threes is to symbolize the three states of life in the broad sense of growing older and gaining wisdom, but more specifically to the artistic view of my mind, the physical state of my body, and the spirituality of my spirit.
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