2018 Monkies Vintage San Marcos Local Artist Showcase, San Marcos, TX.
Artist Bio:
Dilan Baron is an American artist who received his Studio Art Degree at Texas State University San Marcos in 2020. His work consists of drawings that explore the beauty of precise feelings and particular emotions expressed as human form. The use of different mark-making in each of his works supports this idea of emotional tension with each piece, like Melancholy. His use of charcoal in each psychological portrait creates an old, chaotic atmosphere that correlates to the artist even while using the medium. The language of the medium and mark-making can become the whole meaning of the work. Words such as overthinking, pure, anxiety, melancholy, stress, and emptiness have all been describe in his bodies of work.
Thesis statement :
how did we get here \ what do i feel? Self Portrait 4, 2019
Charcoal on paper 24 x 32 inches.
Freud believed that events in our childhood have a great influence on our adult lives, shaping our personality. An anxiety originating from traumatic experiences in one’s past is hidden from consciousness. When we explain our behavior to ourselves or others, we rarely give a true account of our motivation. This is not because we are deliberately lying. While us human are great deceivers of others; we are even more adept at self-deception. Drawing has been a way to express ideas of self-deception through mark-making and imagery pulled from dreams or memory. This creates a psychological language of Universal emotions. emotions like overthinking, depression, anxiety, stress, and emptiness are all subjects described in my work. Growing up as a kid, I was told to never show emotion or cry, as it was a sign of weakness and vulnerability. This made me hide emotions I felt by covering myself with a bed sheet over my head giving this ideal imagery of a suppressed safe space confined in a memory. And as of age came, self deception came in the form of appearance worrying what was felt inside was not to be shown outside.
My bodies of work oscillate between reality (what is/was) and psyche (what feels). Things like body language, tension, and gesture are ways use to convey a physiological attribute. visual tension and contorted body postures help give emotional appeal by meaning of what the viewer sees in the figures. In contradiction, the figure is dressed professionally and covered of identity not knowing the actual feeling of the being. I don't view self-portraits as illustrated recreations of the self, but as ways of viewing one’s emotional state. To define someone without showing of telling who they really are.
Artist Statement :
I create large-scale self-portrait drawings using charcoal on paper. These drawings are meticulously-rendered and specifically staged that uses dramatic and gestural poses as well as visceral symbolism as a focus for both personal and universal narratives. I create my self-portrait drawings out of a compulsion to document eternal thoughts of emotion from the mind. By using the traditional medium of charcoal on paper, I purposefully go through the meticulous process of handling charcoal to work around ever mark that is made. Good or bad. by the use of the self-portrait, I am seeking a candid and sometimes awkward intimacy with my drawings. Before I begin a work of mine, I plan, sketch, and make multiples of my work over and over in my mind for weeks or months. I take photographs, print images from the Internet, and arrange subject matter in my mind before I begin. By the time I actually start the piece, the hard part is over.
“Out of all of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.”
-Sigmund Freud