Owen Carver

Portrait of Self

We humans are social beings. Our meanings and definitions are socially derived. Our views of the world are created by millions of years of interactions and the social constructs created by those interactions. The “self” in my show is your inner voice that interrupts the world, telling you act this way or that way, or that this is “us” and that is “them”, or difference between good and bad. So how do you illustrate this?

What I have attempted to do is create works of art that are easy for my audience to interpret to hopefully make it easier to focus on your inner thoughts of the work. Working under the assumption that portraits would be the easiest to recognize or connect with. In this body of work, each portrait has three different versions. My thought is that it will potentially give the viewer more freedom to experience and choose in a visual sense. Each portrait is drawn with different techniques and they intentionally have an extremely wide range of colors. All of this is done in the hope that the viewer will question what it is about different colors, styles, or backgrounds in an individual representation of the same person that make them turn to one work over another.

For me, the creative process is both equally what the artist creates and what the viewer sees. The artist may create with intentions to express certain thoughts, feelings, ideas or ideals but the viewer’s own views and experiences will turn the expressions into something else. There is no intention of trying to push my own values and meaning on others with this work, only to try and stimulate a conscious thought of what artistic values, forms, or experiences matter the most to you as an individual. Even further though to think about how you as individual where influenced by experiences, friends, and teachers to see certain works of art as “good” or “bad”.
Owen Carver