godless little creature

"i read recently that over the span of 40 years, edvard munch painted six copies and many many studies of his piece "the sick child", a painting that depicted his sister dying from tuberculosis at 15. learning about this struck me in a funny way. since graduating (and honestly just over the years) my relationship with my own art has become toxic - nothing portfolio-worthy, nothing technically impressive, nothing good enough for me or anyone else. too emo. almost all the work i made in college were goofy projects about my dead brother and suddenly realised i was in the job search world with nothing clean enough to show. employers dont want to see that. thats like realising a wild animal in their office. so i just stopped. no point. started over. ive spent a lot of time since looking into design and teaching myself ad*be illustrator. something about the coldness of some vector art (specifically this facebooky graphic style commonly referred to as "corporate memphis") appealed to me. no one has a real skin color, sometimes not even a face, just shapes and blobs. impersonal and easy to produce. oh baby. only recently did it occur to me that i "could do something fun" with that "for myself". munch's "the sick child" represents a lot to me- love, grief, survivor's guilt. the fact that he did this painting over and over was a comfort - obvs i'm no legendary painter but it was a reminder to me that it doesn't automatically make you a lousy artist to use art as an exorcist for trauma. that's actually the point🤨 girl. (where was i going with this) sooo this is my "corporate memphis clip art" take on munch's "the sick child".🤷🏻‍♀️ the strongest emotion i know in a work-friendly wrapper. big sorry for the essay but i feel like this is the first piece of mine ive liked (even if it's the artistic equivalent a muzak rendition of beethoven). it's stupid and was fun to do. yeehaw. thanks 💋 maybe ill do the scream next idk."

full disclosure: there are aspects of corporate memphis that i (oceanlandworld) actually love in an artistic sense. i love the abstraction of human form, the bright flat colors, and the lineless cutout style*! and i love seeing people do creative and interesting things with this style that was developed for bland and inoffensive uses

what you wrote about packaging "the strongest emotion [you] know in a work-friendly wrapper" really captures what is striking to me about killpony's take on gentileschi's painting. gentileschi's judiths have been meaningful to me for a long time as an expression of rage against sexual predators (more info here, cw mentions of rape) and that juxtaposition of the intensity of painful feeling in an art style designed to be soft and safe is so interesting and captivating to me.

thank you again for sharing your work!!!!

hello my beautiful flowers!!!!!!!