Vanessa Sobottke Animated Arts Thesis Spring 2019
How can you talk to someone about how you are feeling, when you don’t even have the words in your vocabulary to describe it? Mental illness, like anxiety, is not only difficult to live with, but also difficult to explain to someone. Words have a lack of interest for some people and can be misleading for others. When it comes to mental illness, either people don’t want to talk about it, or they don’t want to listen. I’d like to use color and beauty to bring in more viewers to talk about something difficult. To use color to communicate different emotional states and to use textures and patterns to communicate one’s thought process. My work ranges from acrylic and watercolor paintings, photoshop animation and animated installations that could belong in any space. In my past work I often used human portraits matched with a selective color palette to portray a certain emotion or to evoke a feeling. The central focus on my recent work has been to communicate mental illness through colors and images rather than words. Where words can lack in one area, color can make up for it in the other. I would describe my current work as mixed media, since I work through different process layers. Such as photoshop drawn animations, mixed with hand painted watercolor compositions and then displayed on an installed spaced for viewers to interact and have a personal viewing with the work.