Throughout all the years I’ve spent making art, I had assumed that the process stopped when your hand leaves the paper. But developing a portfolio has taught me that putting together your pieces is half of the effort. I wanted to place a heavy focus on my photography from the start, so I put my best photos into a collection. Testing a few different styles of presenting, like putting all the photos on a wall or showing each one with a border to make it look like it was being shown through a camera, I ended up presenting the collection as a photobook, using each page to frame the photos differently. When I laid out the rest of my pieces I was met with the challenge of fitting in everything else with my photography. After hours and hours of thinking of things to do, I looked at the photobook I made again and thought about how much my work differs from that of the average student. If it’s that different, then shouldn’t my presentation be different too? I decided to use the photobook as my presentation, integrating all my other pieces in between the photos, connecting each piece to one another thematically. I feel this type of presentation shows how I see the art that I make, and how that contrasts with the rest of the world.
I’ve always seen a difference in how I approach art to the people around me. Ever since I was young I had a fascination with comic books, specifically paneling and dialogue. In every piece that I’d make, there would be some kind of visual structure, rather than just one focal point. Whenever I showed what I made to people though, they’d say it’s cluttered and distracting. I lived with the mindset that there was something fundamental that I needed to fix with my art, until the year I started high school at the Boston Arts Academy. I wanted to join the studio art department as I thought that’d fit me best, but was placed in Graphic Design. I was frustrated at first, but I began to realize that my style was being drawn out. Visual hierarchy, mass appeal, text placement, each of these are essential to Graphic Design. I felt found as an artist through this type of design focused art, so in order to craft my portfolio I leaned on the knowledge I’d amassed from my time at high school to make a collection that, above all else, shows who I am.
