Despair Through Music: A Junior Conceptual Project by Brittany Haley (2015)

For the conceptual project, I decided I wanted to use a combination of photography and painting. When I think of the word despair, I imagine sand slipping through my fingers that I am not able to hold onto, and as I watch it it disappear, no matter how hard I try, it never seems to stay. So, when I decided to use photography as my medium, I took pictures of hands against a dark background but I used a flashlight to light up certain parts and cast shadows. In photoshop, I layered four images of the hands all in different locations in the frame and decreased the opacity. I did this because I thought it illustrated the feeling of despair best and the anxiety of trying to hold on to something that you can’t. I printed that image out and glued my fine art element onto it. For the fine art, I created a painting that had a mixture of colors that expressed different types of emotions. For example, I used yellow to represent happiness and hope, and I used black to represent darkness and despair. I did this because I wanted the colors to represent all the different emotions and feelings you get through trying to create music. I then ripped the painting up into very tiny pieces to represent the sand I talked about earlier, and strategically glued these pieces onto the image. When gluing it on, I put the happy colors that convey hope and excitement that you feel through creating music onto the palm of the hands. I then put the darker colors on the bottom to represent this feeling of losing hope as it slips through your fingers until eventually, all you are left with is a pile of darkness, lost dreams, no hope, and despair.