Catharsis in Charcoal | Snapshots

I created these pieces without initially realizing, but they each tie into my childhood. I played around with many different ideas of art for many of the different stories that are in our edition, but I settled upon three pieces that spoke to me the most in terms of how I could frame them artistically. The Polaroid camera I used as a reference while drawing was similar to one that my mother owned when I was young. My father was one of my softball coaches in elementary school, and we would often go to the park with my brother to throw a ball around. My grandmother’s favorite flowers are orchids, and we get them for her every Mother’s Day. All of these pieces called to me, in some way or another, and they ended up connecting to me in more personal ways than I thought they would.

Snapshots

This piece was created with Leah Skay’s Social Creatures in mind, a fiction piece that has been published in our latest issue. It was created using charcoal and graphite. I chose to portray the Polaroid camera because it seemed like we were getting snapshots into this story. Each timestamp was a snippet of the full story, but it was in reverse order, which is why I felt the scattered Polaroids fit in, as the way the reader received the story was scattered.