Amanda Cohoon ART399 Portfolio

“That\u27s why sometimes I feel nostalgic over something I haven\u27t lost yet, because I see its transience.” This quote comes from a conversation between Sigmund Freud and the poet Rilke. It was said in a conversation about the inevitability of how one day everything will dissolve into meaningless and the fact that impermanence is a very real thing. Growing up I encountered a lot of loss within my family, so centering my art around my family is my way of never letting them go. My whole life I have been surrounded by such gifted storytellers, always going on about days past, the good ole times, and occasionally the bad. Personally, I have never been good at articulating these things or even writing them down but bringing the story to life again through my art is my way of not letting impermanence become a reality. In my art, I am immortalizing the people/moments/items I have or have lost in order to preserve the attachment I have formed with all of these elements. Painting and printmaking often require multiple layers during the art making process. These layers of making parallel to the layers of memories and emotions I am compiling together in my art. As I build my layers of the images it allows me to deepen my relationship with the photograph I am interpreting. During this process I create purposeful interruptions to the composition. For example, I will leave out parts of the figure based on how well I knew the person or if I was there for the memory I am recreating. I also manipulate colors within my work primarily for an aesthetic purpose but it is also driven by colors I find to be nostalgic or colors that connect to an emotion tied to the figure. Part of my process revolves around researching stories from my family’s past and then retelling them. My work is often created from multiple images montaged together. I choose photos that aid my narratives while also being aesthetically pleasing. The process of realistic rendering feels nostalgic and sacred to me, like trying to recapture a lost memory with intense focus. I hope that my work reminds viewers both how short life is and how important it is to be present with those we surround ourselves with. The process I go through may not give my viewer a title or even names, but I hope they gain an understanding of how I felt when learning the stories, or how I felt trying to remember them. My work is influenced by things in and out of the art world. The outside influences are mainly music and nature. I have always been inspired by the idea that all you need to tell a story is three chords and the truth. The genre that that saying has always been tied to is country music which has influenced my entire life. It is an art that is grounded in simplistic storytelling and breathes life into the truth that once was. I strive to be able to tell my own stories in such a successful and visually poetic manner that I grew up hearing through the radio. I am also influenced by nature and how if you look close enough nature will show you what once was. This connects to me because that is what looking at the photographs I use within my work does. Within the art world, two artists that influence my work are Justin Duffus and Mercedes Helnwein. Duffus is also a painter who works with found photos to create his work. He is one of my major influences because we hold a similar dialogue in that we both depict family events and try to make them easy to relate to while also being strange and unknowable. Helnwein is another one of my influences because the disrupted realism she portrays in her work is something I am currently trying to incorporate into the style of my own work.https://digitalcommons.murraystate.edu/art399/1113/thumbnail.jp