About this art: I started doing mixed media while my family was stationed in Germany. I found myself collecting pieces of paper from our travels, and started putting them together.
This series was a commission for Columbia College Today, the alumni magazine for the undergraduate liberal arts school of Columbia University. I won an alumni essay contest, writing about my experiences losing my vision. The arts editor saw my CMYK series and asked if I’d be interested in illustrating the feature in a 3-part series: one for the article’s cover, one tailored to my essay, and one to the winning undergraduate essay. I worked hard to align the pieces not only to their content, but to weave them together in a thematic series. I did this by playing with warm and cool tones, and intermixing images of growth and change (flowers, butterflies), time (clocks), and support (triangle, geometric patterns).
You can read the essays and see the piece, “Of Memory and Metamorphosis,” here.