Title of Art Piece: Self Portrait
Category: Drawing
Student/Artist’s Name: Cassie Galasso
School: Haines High School
Grade: 12th
Artist Statement: Where have the artists gone? It almost seems everyone in this world is averaging out; everyone’s actions and feelings playing off each other, impacting the sculpture that is the average human being. I fear no one will be able to break this mold, and eventually everyone will be the same, their minds synching to create one. Everyone is capable of being an artist, but artists are the people who have broken the imagination mold and have taught their minds to misbehave.
People have so much energy, and so much potential, it is a waste to exist without really existing. You can exist and follow the status quo, walk where the sidewalk is and fly where the jetstreams are. And then, there’s the artists’ way; to create art. Just like there’s two different ways you can look out a window: you can unfocus and just see the blurry passing of colors, or you can focus and take in every tree, every car, every pedestrian. There’s so much energy everywhere, capable of being taken into the hands of an artist and transformed. I think these ideas are the definitions of freedom, they are the feelings that the living people feel. They are the feelings of an artist.
To me, living and freedom are the water, whether it’s the glacial runoff in our southeast Alaska lakes, the Chilkat river, the Lynn Canal, or the Haines Borough pool, it’s the gracefulness and weightlessness of no boundaries. Our limbs that are designed for land break the rules and propel us in any direction. Our hair strays outward and our fingers get wrinkled and our body is sideways instead of up. It’s like being a completely different person in the water, capable of so much more than our land-going selves. But then the minute passes, and our lungs burn and eyes sting, and then humans aren’t meant for the water anymore and we’re forced upward again, buoyancy almost being the water’s resistance to us. It’s a brief freedom but I think that makes it all the more prized.
My self-portrait is of me in the water, immersed slightly, because of my love for the water. But the unclear reflection is of my previous statements, on how an artist is different than the average human being. While most everyone is socializing to create an aesthetic mean of characteristics, we are submersed in the body of water that is society, with the ripples being social implications caused by artists. They are disruptions in the glassy social order. Things put under a liquid surface and viewed from above makes it twist and misshape, a random but repeated pattern, and make you question what’s there. We should question everything, misbehave from social paths and find our inner artist.