JOSAN SPOONER’s Art portfolio
Artist’s statement:
I love art. I love the feeling of clay on my hands and a paintbrush between my fingers. Art, for me, is more about the process than the outcome, of planning a piece before making it and watching my design come to life before my eyes. Whenever things get hard, art clears my mind. This is why I love art; my passion for it makes me feel bliss while creating an entirely new thing. My goal as an artist is to share this feeling through my pieces in whatever way I can while improving as an artist. This feeling is what I experience when I create, so I tend to draw things to provoke this as well. My main subject is people or anthropomorphized things that look like they do not have a care in the world. However, whenever I plan pieces enough, they tend to have a subtle negative subtext through the use of symbolism, though it still contains a sense of innocence.
Because I know that my eyes often deceive me while creating pieces, I heavily utilise colour theory and balance in my works so a motif that might suffer from shaky lines or small dents in clay will fall back on the pre-planned theory within the design. I love colour theory, and I think of what colours I will use to emphasize each other before starting. I also make a game of sketching by imagining what would first attract the viewer’s eye then using the other elements of the piece to lead the eye around the main subject and then right back to the beginning. I believe this pre-planning is what makes my work unique – it is planned based on colours, balance and structural integrity first and foremost.
When I look back at my art, I can only see the process of creating it, and how I felt while doing so. I hear that people see it as popping, that it stands out. The symbolism I use may be subtle, but the piece itself is not. I am first inspired by the people around me. I attend an all-girls school and the people around me are overwhelmingly beautiful, though they do not seem to realize it. This beauty is what I want to create. Artists like Andy Warhol also inspire me. The aforementioned Warhol does not impact my style as much as his boldness does. When I was younger, I read through an art textbook and was fascinated by the fact that the other pieces seemed to be subtle in shading, colours and lines, but Andy Warhol was bold in everything he did, the father of pop art had art that truly popped. My art does not resemble his, but I do get my art’s boldness from him
St. Andrew High School for Girls’ 95th Anniversary Logo
Year: 2020
Medium: digital art
Program: firealpaca
I designed my high school’s 95th anniversary logo, which is now used in printed media such as the sign upon entering school campus, newspapers, signs, the school website, and much more.
I used the font abril fatface, but this was changed upon publishing.
Below are the uses of the logo in print media.
The original request for logo designs stated:
I believed that the logo for the year previous was good, but too large. It could be more concise. The way it sprawled across signs it was printed on made me believe it could convey the same message with less space. I thought of the circle design because this would solve this problem, and in this modern age, a compact logo is needed to truly catch one’s attention.
