I Will Not Fear
I Will Not Fear is an ongoing collection of colorful paintings and mixed media sculptures that are inspired by dark feelings such as anxiety and depression that I dealt with for as long as I can remember.
I started out this thesis with the mindset that I would just be doing a project. It was something I was excited to get started with but nervous for what would happen through the process. I didn’t know where it was going, or what I wanted it to look like. I was afraid. I was anxious. I felt pushed, exhausted and pressured by my own expectations. I felt trapped within my own feelings that things would not work out.
This work is about fear. Fear of everything to come and fear of the nothingness that follows. Fear, that which resides in every person until we’re gone and all that is left behind are the impressions we left upon the world. We fear what those impressions might be, and we fear that we cannot change them. My world was built upon fear of what’s to come. Who I am is influenced by fear and the whole mess of feelings that go along with it. So why reject it? If fear is always going to be around me, then the best thing to do is to accept it. Feel it. Laugh at it! Let fear push me to do the things I only dream of doing.
And so, I allowed this work to represent everything that I tried hard to push away. Brushstroke after brushstroke, this process became more than a project. It became an escape, not from my fears, but from the world that felt shadowed by them. I was able to investigate who I was and examine what I feared and why. A vulnerability that I never allowed myself to experience before. My paintings each show a side of my fear that make me question my mortality and expose that vulnerability. But the imagery does not convey darkness. It does not represent fear as something that I can’t escape because, I don’t need to escape it. Without sacrificing the tradition of paintings on a wall, I created images that took form in our world through physical elements that are an analysis of the fears they represent. That analysis not only creates deeper meaning within the pieces but provides me a chance to laugh at them and find joy in their meaning.
The whole process, beginning to end, proved to be a challenge. But the most difficult part is now not being able to do it anymore. This thesis has seen me through troublesome parts of my life. From losing someone I once cared about, to working on building a relationship of acceptance with my family and small things in between. I delved deeper into who I wanted to be and allowed painting to guide me through it. I sat in the gallery after the work was installed and I cried. I knew, at that moment, that everything I’ve done during this thesis has made me better. I felt that I was losing something that would push me to keep growing. For not only did I grow as an artist, doing things I didn’t think I would be doing from the beginning, but I found an appreciation for the parts of myself that I hated. I came out of it more confident on my ability to be an artist as well as more accepting of things that troubled me about myself. The work showed me that fear is a beautiful feeling. That I shouldn’t be afraid of it. That I can now look fear in the face and tell it “I Will Not Fear.”
