Untitled Painting

My name is Theresa Simmons, and I am an artist living in Iowa. I am primarily a painter. I have recently received my BFA degree in Studio Art: Emphasis Painting with a Minor in Art History at the University of Northern Iowa. My passion is painting and I employ different reference imagery mostly from photographs I have taken to draw from in my work. I find the human form to be incredibly intriguing and am continually looking for different ways to bring aspects of the body and its forms into my painting. My work is varied, and diverse in media and subject matter, as I explore many alternate ways to create artwork. Artist Statement My recent work surrounds an interest in mass media, as well as homemade snapshots and some found imagery, that comment on the documentation of human life. The kinds of imagery humans disperse into the world via magazines, television, and other media forms have lead to the work I make. The main concepts deeply threaded in my work are recognition and identity. Portraits typically represent someone's face, but what interests me is when the person turns around and all that is visible is their hair, and maybe some of their clothing, details that are limited in order to challenge our concept of recognition. I have my subjects face away from the camera in order to capture their hair, because I think hair is as dynamic as facial features, with its texture, subtlety and versatility, hair says as much about someone's personality or identity as their facial features can if not more. The point I am making in this work is the idea that you can look at these images but the information given is so limited that it is hard to know or recognize the subjects as who they actually are. I have always been attracted to ambiguity and work that challenges my ideas about different concepts because I want to be drawn in to work and stay looking at it to figure it out for myself, and I want that for those who view my work also. I deal with the concept of how photographs are portrayed to the population, as well as how we are influenced through this imagery. Humans naturally make judgments about others, especially in their first impressions of someone, which is usually only consisting of a glance. This fascinates me, because we so quickly make judgments about others.