The Halloween Party

My studio project, the final exhibition for which will also be named The Halloween Party, is a mix of individual works and a picture-book. The individual works consist of oil paintings on canvas, and gouache paintings on paper. The oil paintings deal with the figurative, although there are abstract moments to be found within them. Whether or not the figure is present, the paintings are at heart about people. Their more obviously perceivable subjects, however, move between the domestic, portraiture, and the outside environment. The individual gouache works are painted in an illustrative style, a way of painting that is suited to gouache. While they deal with the figurative, are not as realistic as the oil works. Their subject is also people, but those people are portrayed in much more fantastical ways. Both the gouache and oil paintings are accompanied by words, which are written like captions under the image. The words direct and alter the meaning of the image. My picture-book will be scanned and put together into a functional book for the final exhibition. However, each individual image (or page) is hand-painted gouache onto paper, much like the gouache individual images. Similar again to the gouache individual images, the style of the paintings leans to the illustrative, but like the oil works, abstract moments can be found within the figurative. The colour-palette of the picture book tends more toward bright, bold colours than my individual works. The picture-book follows a girl named Clarisse, as she collects objects she finds fascinating, and attempts to show them to her parents, who are both blithely busy with their work. Hurt, Clarisse runs away, but gets cold and lonely, so eventually goes back home, where her parents have not noticed her running away, but have made her a delicious dinner. The book investigates the magic of childhood, as well as the feelings of sadness, hurt, and loneliness often a part of being a child. It examines the imperfect nature of parenting, and how gestures of love can so often be missed or misunderstood by those they are intended for. As a whole, my studio project is about love, small moments that are actually big, and paint.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Fine Arts

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Grantor

Otago Polytechnic | Te Pukenga - NZ Institute of Skills and Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Miller, Pippi

• portraits
• painting
• gouache painting
• children in art
• parenting in art
• picture books
• exhibitions
• Otago (N.Z.)
• New Zealand

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

DOI

https://doi.org/10.34074/thes.6067

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:researchbank.ac.nz:10652/6067