I have written about the exposition quite often over the past few weeks, but that will come to an end with this post because the exposition’s official award and closing ceremony was held this Saturday. The exposition was held during the first two weeks of April and those two weeks went by incredibly fast. For those who dive into this post completely blank: I was one of the participants in this year’s edition of the annual exposition Beeldend Veenendaal.
Now that the exposition has come to an end it’s probably about time that I shared the artwork I made for it in full glory along with some other photographs of the event. I was also asked to give some more insight behind this artwork so I will use this post to share that as well.
This is the artwork I made for the exposition, I had it printed on A1 format (60x85cm) and pasted on 5mm of foam. Seeing my work on such a large format and amidst the work of 112 other local artists was absolutely fantastic.
The reason I participated in this exposition was to promote myself and digital art in general amongst the local artists and the art platform of Veenendaal. Like I said: I specifically made this surreal digital artwork for the exposition. I wanted it to be something worth talking about, something that revealed more details each time you would look more closely at it and something that could be interpreted differently by everyone. It turned out to be very interesting, I’ve received many questions and comments on it during the times I was present at the exposition. The question I was asked mostly was: “How did you make this?” Which of course led me to my goal of promoting digital art.
More into the artwork itself: I wanted this to be a powerful and darker piece. Reflecting a form of struggle we individually cope with, an entrapment in ourselves. I tried to reflect that by blending the heads together, displaying a persona wrestling with various emotions. As I often do I did try to twist the entire thing so that it can be interpreted differently. Here’s a small selection of words I picked from Andrew Danso’s review in which he describes this artwork insanely close to my original concept:
“I think what you say here is awesome - that we're torn each day by this dark light, good evil co-existence. We're entrapped by the way it makes us feel, but ultimately it's what makes us who we are.“
This was actually the first time that my work was showcased in an exposition and that just felt incredible. Some other exciting related news was that the Dutch Advanced Photoshop magazine picked up on all of this and posted a mailbox feature about me and the exposition in their April issue. If you’d like to see more detailed images of the actual piece itself you can visit my project page about it. As always I hope you liked it, feel free to let me know your thoughts on this artwork via Twitter or Facebook.
Nederlands