Hi friends!
Thank you for reading my first blog!!
At uni, I am a straight A student when it comes to tests, but with my writing I'm just AWFUL! So I am just going to write from my heart (cringey I know) because that is all I know. Some think it's fascinating that I am a medical student but also an artist, is this uncommon?
You read the title of this blog, so you know what I will be rambling on about today!
I am a self taught artist living in Adelaide, soon to be living in the UK. For as long as I can remember I would always find myself picking up a pencil, paintbrush, or doing something crafty in school (do you remember playing with those little beads and when you iron them they stick together? I loved doing those as a kid). I have always had this passion for art and during my teenage years I explored many different mediums and styles of art, especially in art class.
It was not until year 12 art class that I found my absolute love and passion for spiritual art. I did not have many friends in school, in fact I was that girl that was often disliked for unknown/untrue reasons. I was often called 'weird', 'loud' etc etc *eye roll*. But as I grew older, I took these 'insults' as compliments and started to love myself.
Only when I started to love myself, I started to feel connected to spiritual artists and their work. My year 12 art teacher also had similar interests and we would often find ourselves lost in awe when reading behind the meanings of some of these pieces of art. I decided to choose a few of these artists and explore the elements of spiritual artwork in my visual study. Small things like colour and the use of animals can really affect the way you feel towards an artwork.
Imagine you see a Lion in an artwork, what comes to your mind? Power, leadership and strength?
What about the colour yellow? Happiness and sunshine!
This is what I was drawn to and I created work related to flowers and their spiritual meaning, especially the lotus flower and the different meanings each colour represented (definitely check this out, it is so interesting!).
Fast forward a few years.....
I started practicing drawing people as I was always told I was not good at drawing them and animals were 'more my thing'. When I finished high school, all of those social pressures became less existent and I started to become inspired by women and their beauty (no longer blinded by those immature 'popular' girls in school who always find ways to put you down). I have never come across a woman and thought that she was not beautiful, like how can they not be?! As I started to express myself as a woman, I met/read about so many others and realised just how much we go through and I was really inspired by this!
Using my pencil skills and knowledge of spiritual art, I came up with 'Guide', the first beauty created in the Spirit collection.
'Guide' is of a woman in greyscale drawn in graphite pencil. She has a tree frog sat on her shoulder in watercolour. The positioning of the woman and the animal is not random and is very strategic. I like to think of the woman's face/body as the shell in black and white and the animal represents her soul, which is in vibrant colour, catching the eye of the audience. The spiritual meaning of the tree frog is transition and transformation. It also represents fertility and the mysteries of life. How beautiful is that? I had to strategically place the tree frog on her shoulder as her 'guide' through her transformation and leading her towards her life mysteries. I was kind of in a way inspired by myself and my transition from being a teased young girl in high school to travelling alone, finding my passions and smashing life as a woman in the open world!!
After creating the first piece, I decided to draw a variety of women with several different spirit animals with different meanings. I wanted to create pieces of art that not only represented all women's beauty inside and out, but also empower women that see my work to be inspired by the spiritual meanings.
I hope that this gives you a little insight into my work and how and why I got into creating it. It saves me blabbing on about this stuff on my instagram!! Thank you for reading! I will be back with more blogs soon, maybe about the process of creating my work or what materials I use.
Lots of hugs,
Charlotte x