Madison Myers

Artist’s Statement

I’ve grown up drawing characters and creatures, constructing stories around them in which I brought them to life,  getting to know and understand them. My characters were often set in historical or fantastical settings. I started out designing costumes for fun with the characters I built up in my mind, but soon found myself craving the ability to bring my designs into the physical world. For a year or two, I designed Halloween costumes and bossed my poor mum around as she sewed tirelessly to make me smile. However, soon she signed me up for sewing lessons. With time, practice, and a bit of supervision, I was able to bring my designs to life all on my own. 

As my work has progressively become more conceptual, history has become the inspiration and roots for my designs. It is the tether of a kite as my designs soar further and further out. I started inventing my own original characters and concepts to design for. As I embraced my more conceptual side I started to become more personal in some of my work and some of my costumes started to reflect my own experiences. One of the themes I explored was armor. It was a response to some experiences in my life where for a time, I felt this figurative armor that once surrounded me had shattered. I was left in a very vulnerable state and I went through a long journey of building myself new armor and finding myself again. It got me thinking about what armor was in all senses of the word. What are the different types of physical armor? What is armor in a figurative and emotional sense and how do we display that? I came to my essential question “ “How can I express and portray the variety of what armor can be?” I started with armor in the very traditional sense by painting a steel gauntlet. Then because of the pandemic I thought about how PPE Gear is our armor against the virus. It could almost be seen as armor in a battle against Covid-19. I also am painting a self portrait with both the physical armor of my cast as a child and memories and places and people that help make up my own figurative armor. I am not done with this theme either. Though Painting Class is over I will continue this theme.

My first painting was of the steel gauntlet. I used acrylic paints and hogs hair brushes. I stuck to an achromatic scale as I got to know how to use value in painting. At first, I struggled to get the value scale right. I leaned heavily into a variety of beautiful dark grays but few lighter ones. I’ve noticed that in drawing I also tend to end up with darker values. Because I was painting metal, it was important I got my values right, especially my light values. It took me some trial and error but in the end my value scale greatly improved. I was much more sparing with my black and the end result was great. I managed to capture the shiny mental well and it gave the gauntlet great form. That is why I think the Element of Art I used most effectively was Value and Form. The Principle of Design I think I used most effectively was Proportion. I took extra care in initially capturing where and how the gauntlet existed in the space when initially gridding on my To-scale Sketch and translating that onto the final piece. Much of what I learned from this carried over to my PPE Gear painting. 

In this I painted a woman in full PPE Gear. I looked at several reference images but I settled on this one photograph in which the framing and position felt great. The way I painted it paid homage to the paintings of knights of old. I captured the texture of the woman’s gown to look a bit gritty and bulky like weathered armor. A yellow glow emanated around her like a halo and dark edges framed her. It was emblematic of the old Christian paintings of saints and knights. My use of value continued to improve in this painting even with color. I used primarily the complementary hues of blue and orange in this painting. Blue for the PPE gear and orange hues for the woman’s skin. The Element of Art I used most effectively was Texture. The Principles of Design I used most effectively were Proportion and Scale. This is seen how I portrayed the big bulky outfit and how the woman in the painting occupied the space.

I am careful and intentional with my work, and so if I have a deeper and longer story, I want to add much more depth to my work. I place effort into researching, drafting, planning, and producing each work.  I want to do it justice, so I want to know everything to inform my interpretation better. I need to understand the story and, most notably, the characters in their entirety so that I can get into their heads and know how they would express themselves.