This is the full interview conducted with my amazing partner Princess!
Video coming soon... very soon
Aymann: Why did you decide to start painting?
Princess: Painting, that’s something I started back in high school. I was a part of a visual performing arts magnet program, so towards our senior year I started painting, and I decided to continue on with it when I came to Mason Gross.
Aymann: What are you planning to do when you graduate?
Princess: When I graduate, I’m looking into Savana College of Art and Design so hopefully get masters in teaching, or possibly a masters in fine arts and possibly become an art teacher or a director administrator over a youth program.
Aymann: Did you have a lot of support when you first started applying for schools?
Princess: I had a lot of support. The only thing was that I did not apply to schools such as risdi or mika, and teachers that I had were kind of disappointed with that decision, but I knew that I wanted to come to a school where I can practice visual arts and also study other things besides art; such as social justice or women’s studies. Things like that and not just be so centered on art alone.
Aymann: So what do you have over here with your paintings?
Princess: This first one comes from a series that I did, 7 deadly sins, and this one right here is vanity. You see there is a reference to medicine and things like that because I do enjoy studying medicine and the human body. So I decided to take a look at vanity. One of things that have been a concentration, for me, was my nose. Usually for an African-American, you can tell that they are African-American based on features such as their nose or their lips or their eyes and stuff like that. So I focused on that in this painting. Just relating it to Vanity and how at this time everyone is trying to get plastic surgery and change how they look and change how they are, and all of this is just outward appearance. It can be taken as inwardly as well where if you want to just remove some things, but other than that it is just focused on your outward appearance.
Princess: This was my first painting that I did that was completely done with a pallet knife. It was basically practicing with the pallet knife and working with colors and putting colors together. So I just used the reference of a model that we had, and then transforming that into a story line and what that can be. So what you see over here is kind of like hes sitting down in a field and you see this red blood look to it, so it kind of as if he is sitting in his own blood. Kind of a representation of sin, so it is like he is sitting in his own sin, but he is doing nothing about it, just sitting there. Just using the pallet knife and working from there, it also has a texture on it, so it gives anyone a chance to feel it and almost become a part of it at the same time.
Princess: So after doing this here I moved on to working larger with the pallet knife and surprisingly it saves paint. This one right here comes from a series that I did on some photos that I took with a friend of mine. It is called “What She Holds,” and it is basically pregnancy and conceiving and withholding something within you and you are ready to give birth to it in a sense. It could be spiritually, or naturally, it could be like a gift or talent that you might have and you are ready to give birth to it. This right here is a pregnant woman, and it is zoomed in on her belly and you are getting a look inside of her womb and to the fetus. Well not a fetus because the baby is still growing but you can see the umbilical cord and the baby wrapped in the blood and everything in here is like nasty and just looks disgusting. But once she gives birth to it, it is cleaned up and it looks good and will grow into something great. What I love about this is the texture. Someone once told me that it looks like a bear or a monster or something like that, it looks beastly. A reading that I did not too long ago was about a philosopher who believed women to be beastly like animals. But at the same time his mother was a woman who gave birth to him. So this beastly thing had enough power to bring him into this world. So just noticing how the female body has this strength and this power to withhold life, and just the same with us , we have the power and ability to hold something and let it grow and give birth to it. You can see that with the talent and ability to paint and draw is what you are capable of giving birth to. You can neuture it and feed it the right things, you can give birth to something really great.
Aymann: I’m going to say that my favorite is the birth… Does it have a title?
Princess: I believe I gave it the title “What She Holds.” It may change, but right now it is “What She Holds.”
Aymann: The texture looks amazing and how you can get in all of those details with just a pallet knife is really incredible. It is very impressive. The Plastic Surgery painting, I can really relate to. I feel that people say “Hey your Egyptian!” before I even get to say anything. I have a very Egyptian nose. I am proud of it, but at the same time, its like ‘hey, I have a name…’
Princess: Yea, that goes into, in general, how people can judge you based on your outward appearance and how they only look at just the skin color, the nose, and facial features, and maybe just the first couple of words that might come out of your mouth, but that is not completely who you are. In a blog that I am creating, one of the things that I say in the blog is even in the few things that I list about myself, you wont really know who I really am until you ask me the right questions. So even with words that people say because that’s only just the surface. So we are basically tapping beyond the surface. So even in this painting over here, even though we can see through and look at the baby, we still don’t know who the baby is until the baby is born, and that is when you get a sense of the characteristics and what that baby will be like.
Princess: Some other things that I am hoping to work on is identity, facial features, and ethnicity. So one of the things that I look foreward to working on will be the study of the body and the African American body and hair, especially African-American women’s hair and things like that. I look foreward to getting started on that project and seeing how it goes and hopefully it will be successful.
