Final Proposal

Research: Anxiety, how people deal with anxiety and surrounding emotions, human reaction

Materials: Canvas, acrylic, sharpies, pen and ink on paper

Objective:
As a person who often has intense anxiety problems I wanted to do a series symbolizing anxiety and how people tend about worry at situations until they are a much bigger problem then originally. For my final project, I will paint and draw realistic portraits of people playing with bright red string. Skin colors will remain duller then usual, while the string will be almost too bright, symbolizing the intense feeling of anxiety. I will do a minimum of three variations of this idea, with the string becoming tighter and more tangled up through the progression of the portraits. This idea is based on a theory from the book Emotionomics, by Dan Hill, in which he compares mixing colors to mixed emotions.
This makes sense when applied to anxiety could mean you’re feeling sad but also scared that things won’t get better, that situations could get worse. You could be angry but confused, in the same way colors such as grey have blue, green, or even purplish tints.

To connect my pieces to color, I will relate each color to a kind of an emotion, such as red equals anger, blue equals sad. Then, I will title each painting a mix of those colors, like “Red + Blue”, which would, in
this context, become its own brand of anxiety. Red being anger and blue being sad, this would mean this painting would be a more negative side of anxiety while if yellow, were to equal happy, and you added blue, this could be a more positive butterflies-in-your-stomach kind of anxiety. This title would bring the piece in full circle back to the subject pulling at the ball of string until it becomes a bigger problem then it was originally.