Creative Project

For my creative project I created a painting of a woman using a variety of bright colors. In my opinion, art should leave room for interpretation by the audience so I decided to make this piece somewhat abstract so that people can use their own creativity to give it meaning. I chose to make a woman because the concept of and presentation on eco-feminism really stood out to me. Looking at this painting from an eco-feminist perspective, the colors included could represent womens connection to the natural world, and the white lines could represent a sort of energy that fosters that connection. However, looking at this painting with the anthropocene in mind might make the colors and brushstrokes look more like scars or wounds, representing the damage that human beings have done to this earth, and in turn, damage that we have done to ourselves. With that same perspective, the black brushstrokes could represent a frantic mind because the changing world is a confusing thing that takes up a lot of mental space. The warm colors and abstract white lines could also represent women as simply divine and beautiful, as I pictured the woman in “Skywoman Falling”. 

Worldwide literature characterizes women in a vast array of different ways. Some literature represents women as fragile or incapable, some represent women as strong and independent, some as mysterious, some as divine, etc. These different representations are even visible throughout the different texts that we have read this term. For example, Braiding Sweetgrass highlighted women as divine through the “Skywoman Falling” story, whereas “Flight Behavior” characterizes the female character as somewhat weak at first before she grew into someone stronger. With this painting I attempted to encompass all of these different representations through the use of abstraction in color. Women cannot be characterized as strictly one way or another, so representing a woman as all women was also part of my goal with this project.