Artist Statement
“Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself”-Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt our 32nd president has said that fear is the only thing you should be afraid of but I think that is definitely not the case. For my project I investigated people's fears and most fears are things people should be afraid of. I used the thinking skill synthesizing to explore deeper into human behavior starting at fears. To start off my project I decided to go around interviewing people of different age groups and backgrounds. I asked each person their age, one fear that is of a physical thing (ex: heights, blood, terrorist attack), and one fear that is more physiological (ex: fear of rejection, feeling someone is watching you, or of any anxieties). What I wanted to get out of the project was a larger understanding of fear by learning about different people around me and what they fear. Before going into this project I thought that people would have fears that change with age. I found that the same fears can be found in people of different age groups and that fear can be constant through people's lives. In my interviews I interviewed 11 people from 10-45 I tried to find elderly people but I don't really know any. During the interview I wanted to create a safe atmosphere by ensuring that their data would not have their names or exact age attached to it because I didn't want people to be discouraged from answering truthfully. I had initially asked about 15 people but only choose to include the more diverse ones. I found that interviewing people and asking about their fears had given me a deeper understanding of who they are and I was able to make more personal connections with them. This research was very valuable because I had a lot of meaningful conversations with people and was able to draw some of my own conclusions about how these fears could have came up. In my research online I found that fear is a tool to humans. From birth we use fear to tell us when we are in danger and should run away. Fear gives us that sense of danger that acts as a stimuli to our nervous system causing a physical response one in the same with the fight or flight response. Fear is primitive and necessary for our survival. Fear in children is natural especially when they are exposed to new things, they can grow out of that fear when they learn there is no danger but they could develop into phobias. A phobia is a very intense fear revolving around a specific thing or scenario even if there is no danger or threat. An amazing fact I saw on HealthLine was that about 19 million Americans have phobias that prevent them from living a normal life. This goes to show how problematic phobias can be. If i step back and analyze this from my point of view I can see that I have a fear of spiders but it doesn't affect me to the extent of avoiding hiking in the woods, but for a person with a phobia of spiders they might be avoiding places all together. I learned that fears can be embedded deep into people's lives and some are just instinctual.
Data I Collected From Interviews
From here I found that the fear of failure is common and there are multiple fears that are on bugs. Some fears that I related to were fears of spiders, failure, running out of time, and of failure. Based on the information people have given me on their fears most of them were not super intense and don't really affect their daily living.
How do you know if you have a phobia?
I found on healthLine some symptoms of phobias: Ask yourself does your fear make your heart race, give you shortness of breath, upset stomach, trembling or shaking, dizziness, or a sense of impending doom? If you do feel that then most likely you have a phobia and not just a fear.
Don't worry there are treatments for phobias too.
I read that antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications can lessen the phobias, but a more direct approach would be from therapy. I found that there is a treatment called Cognitive behavioral therapy(CBT). CBT puts patients in a comfortable situation and then they introduce the fear that they have head on, they might use virtual reality to put the person in to a world where they have to face their fears. This is supposed to expose the patient to the fear head on and show them that there is really nothing to be afraid of. CBT is a great alternative and can used to help people with so many issues like depression or addiction.
This is the sketch of what key things I wanted to put in my painting. My initial vision of the painting would be a woman from profile view with smoky purple hair with little symbols or pieces of the fears through it almost like personifying a haiku. This concept of my art would support the synthesizing portion of my painting because I want to collect smaller pieces of fear and creatively connect them into a bigger whole. I took fears like claustrophobia(small spaces),atychiphobia(failure), Chronophobia ( time) and FOMO (missing out). Ones that I collected because I thought they could add some nice imagery to my painting. But I also added some fears I learned about online, like fearing nuclear disaster or war relating to Russia and North Korea. I took fears of corrupt government officials from Chapman University’s study on the top 10 fears in America.'
I also used the fear that the US will be involved in another war and the fears that North Korea would use nuclear weapons. Because of Recent news I decided to sketch a North korean Nuke and a Russian Nuke together because they both and very threatening to America.
Right here I started to paint the base of the face over a large board that I also coated in black acrylic paint. Since I did do that coat it made it very hard for the next layer of paint to grip onto the board. I think the face started off well I made sure to incorporate blue into the skin onto the neck to give it a cold appearance and on the face I used a lot of pink to give very warm undertones. I really like the contrast in the skin color because it almost makes it look 3D with the reds and blues.
This next part I started to use any leftover blue and added water to it to spread it out like hair flying in the wind. My original Idea was to have smoky hair but then I wanted it to be like very long straight hair that is fanning out like it is shocked. So far things look pretty scary and cold. I want this blue to just be the background layer of hair and I want to paint objects over it and then last paint a layer of hair over and around the objects to place things between the hair.
This painting is done by Edvard Munch the artist that I took alot of inspiration from. This painting is called the Spring Plowing and it is filled with warm and cool colors with free strokes. I think that the colors used were very beautiful and I used the reds and blues in the face and in the hair I used the rainbow assortment. The hair I wanted to use it to show many colors like a whirlwind of emotions that come with fear.
Right here is a close up of the pendulum earing done with white black blue paint and then after I made it have some nice value I used a light layer of gold paint that allows the clock show through. The reason I painted this was to represent fears like thanatophobia(fear of death), atychiphobia(Fear of not accomplishing goals), and FOMO (fear of missing out), and chronophobia(fear of running out of time). These are all time sensitive fears and I think I needed to include time into my fear painting since time related fears keep reoccurring.
This next photo shows the face and I am very happy with how it turned out. Since I used water in my painting the paint has cracked but it made the painting look aged kinda like an old portrait. I choose to keep the eyes white because I wanted to make the girl look like she is blind she cant see clearly because with phobias people can blindly fear without a real reason even if it seems silly. With the eyebrows I gave them a neutral shape but I couldn't decide if I wanted to give them shading inside or just do hair stroke and I ended up doing plain brown eyebrows. I gave her a full glammed out look by giving her skinny pink lips pink blush on the cheeks I used darker brown to contour the nose cheekbones and eyebrow bones. I also used a combination of silver and gold paint to dab on highlighter to her cheekbone and brow bone to imitate a highlighter. For eyeshadow I used brown gold and a cream color combination to really widen the eyes. I gave her very long and thick eyelashes. I think that this part came out beautiful. I added heavy makeup to represent myself in my art since I do wear very heavy makeup.
This F was put here to represent the fear of failure (atychiphobia). This fear is super common for a lot of students because not many people are confident enough to think that they are flawless. A Penn State article wrote about about this phobia and said that between 2 and 5% of Americans suffer from this as an actual phobia but the number of people who are affected by it in smaller forms are a way larger percent. https://sites.psu.edu/akb13/tag/atychiphobia/
This next part is of a black widow spider. I choose this spider to represent all of the spider and insect fears as well as the fear of death since black widows are known to be deadly. I liked this alot because I was successful in making the spider seem shiny or have a very spherical form.
This skyscraper is representing the fear of falling and of heights. I made it seem like someone was hanging on to the edge like they are * not commiting suicide*. I made the front windows white and the side ones black because they are in a shadow. Based just on this picture it looks like the building is being swept away by a strong wave.
Right here I painted a man who is inside of a small box while his face is very distressed because I wanted to show the fear of small spaces(claustrophobia). When researching this fear I also found that there is another fear that is of large open spaces rather than tight spaces. I made the hair sweep over the top of the box and it made it look like someone stuck it inside the hair.
Right here I painted a heart to represent the fear abandonment. I choose the heart because when someone is abandoned by someone they feel very emotional and sad. If someone abandons you they take a bit of your heart and leave you feeling cold and sad without it.
For this part I painted a man being swept away by the hair as if he was drowning and the face textures and colors are inspired by Edvard Munch’s The Scream(below).This part gives people a very anxious feel looking at it since he is in very clear distress.
This is Edvard Munche’s The Scream. I connected the very distorted water in the background and the wavy sky lines to be put into to the hair in my painting.
This portion I explained it in my sketch and on the photo of America's top 10 fears. Some of their biggest fears are that North Korea will send nuclear weapons or that we will be involved in another world war, like in Russia since in the recent month Russia has not been agreeing with President Trump's policies.
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