“From the sincerity of a fountain of young being's swim
That by iridescent beauty’s light shall never dim
But immaturity should by time become wisdom”
-Hana Wittleder
My work and process thrives on the concept of my own body awareness. How it sounds when I press my finger down on the shutter of my camera. The music that brings rhythm to my sketches. The drama in the beauty of the work and the mess I create beyond my canvas. A commitment to the chaos to the oil pastel infused into my finger tips. My art is of my own passion and dissonance within my heart.
Towards the end of the 18th century art and music became more focused on emotion, sensation, and passion. Of which, these concerns have become essential parts to the core of my practice.The inspiration I experience from this period stems primarily from the music that came with it. Frédéric Chopin, a pianist and composer, brought a vicarious quality to his music. In other words, I find it useless trying to escape. The ability of each of his pieces to encapsulate me in their complex emotions. I feel myself being pulled and guided even torn apart. With the notes and chords played as well as the silences. In my work, this power to envelop people within my pieces has been the objective for some time. I wish for viewers of my art to find themselves wandering through my art as they do wandering life.
Within my practice, my process is in the layering of different mediums. In these multi-media pieces I find myself referencing my own photography. These images I do reference for such pieces tend to be multiple exposure or longer exposures. Where either the subject itself is moving or I manually am shifting the camera. In addition to my visual arts I am also a poet and storyteller through my writing. I find myself finding some way to include and reference my writing. Whether it is thematically/conceptually or incorporating text with lines and stanzas from my poetry. In recent work I have typed out my poetry on a typewriter. Then ripped it up and fixed it onto the paper I had planned to create my work on. As a photographer, Much of my work is rooted in self image and focuses on portraiture, especially of myself.
Other goals aside, my art has always been a way of simply expressing myself.
A self reflection at best or worst is what resides in every piece beyond its beauty and perhaps truthful ugliness.
“With his tender hair woven through my fingers when
As the head of his once did repose in my breast
The sun glimmered its rays through those many crystal prisms
I cradle it in mine own bright eyes; I bear the memory in my soft arms
Foe to my own self, to my saccharine self to be what is grim
A created famine where abundance once was
Where I can not recall in full what it felt like to be so blessed in his presence
But the fondness has distinguished my skin
In an blush in my cheek, flushed chest and thighs
Must I purely surrender my anatomy to the souvenirs of reminiscence
Must I torture myself with what I have cease to have
Bath in the knife that create my loneliness
Thereby ridicule my own sense by that
Perhaps not lost but not found neither him or I ”
- Hana Wittleder