Joanna Concejo Is Back

Texture

I am not sure if you remember Joanna Concejo, but a few months back I wrote a piece about her creative, illustrative works.  I really find her artwork inspiring - especially the piece below.  I found the textures of both the bear and the boy in her work to be awesome (in the true sense of the word).  Not only do the almost palpable textures make the piece seem like a portal to another world, but they also add to the meaningfulness of the story within the piece.  To me, when I see the individual furs on the bear and the cloth of the boy’s shirt and how dense those very textures are, I get an underlying feeling that there is more to these characters than meets the eye.  The bear becomes more realistic through his textured fur, and in turn the story behind the bear also becomes more realistic.  This concept can also be applied to the boy and his shirt.  Moreover, this adds another dimension to the work as a whole, adding somewhat of a grit to both of the characters, which makes the overall themes and plot of the piece more interesting (in relation to the piece’s story).  

Thus, because I saw from Concejo’s work that texture was a great asset to use within a piece, I tried creating a piece that heavily relied on texture in order to tell the story – this piece was “The Collage of Persephone.  In the piece, every major aspect of the subject and her surroundings has a different texture: to name a few, her skin is patchy, her hair is composed of many long lines, the flowers are densely packed with smaller details, and the drips in the background are solid black.  This shows different aspects of my character and her surroundings in relation to the overall story of the piece.  The patchy skin shows that she is hiding something, yet that she also is composed of many different concepts – she’s multidimensional.  Another example would be the darkness and density of the flowers shows that they are not just beautiful but also possibly dangerous.  Thus overall, I was heavily influenced by Joanna Concejo’s work in that I realized how great texture can be in order to tell a story within a piece. 

        - J. A. Kind