Mind, Body & Spirit:Depicting People as Animals

Jaquita L.C. Hawthorne

ME

• I consider myself a spiritual person.

• I got interested in spirit animals in grade school

My Spirit Animal?

• Have you ever had a strange encounter with an animal?

• There are different ways to figure out your spirit animal, but you need to have an open mind.

Spirit Animal ?

In the world of spirit animals, animals symbolize:

• Characteristics of our personality

• Skills or traits that we have or that we want to gain

• A situation or emotions

• Spirit animals can also offer guidance and understanding

Artists frequently use animals as subject matter in their art. Through time animals have appeared in paintings, sculptures, and prints. Animals are also symbolic. Many cultures through the ages have observed specific animals as in place of gods, power, the supernatural, and in the cases of Native Americans, used in names.

Thesis

The concept of spiritual animals inspires me to focus my creative work on them. In particular, I am thinking through the problem of how to portray friends using animal metaphors. I hope that my project will help viewers to identify animal traits like I do within my figure drawings, while showing the beauty of the human body

My Roots

5252

7

41

Mainly Blood Tribe

Respect For Nature

“Every seed is awakened and so is all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being and we therefore yield to our animal neighbors the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land.” -Sitting Bull

Almost there

I started thinking about my project last summer. I knew I wanted to use skills and techniques that I learned in figure drawing classes. I also knew that I wanted to use my friends as models to show their different personalities.

Figure drawings done as part of coursework at Ripon College.

On the left is a self-portrait by Rembrandt, and on the right is a sketch of Adam for the Sistine Ceiling by Michelangelo.

“for Color girls who have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf”

A Series of 20 Poems written by Ntozake Shange in 1975

– Experimentally choreographed poem.

– Focus on issues women of color go through.

– Watching the movie by Tyler Perry in 2009 I was inspired to do my project on it, adapted to issues that female students deal with here on the Ripon College campus.

“aura lanterns”• This Idea was like a puzzle

missing pieces.

• I loved the idea of using some of the skills I learned from working on plays at the college.

• I wanted to do a full figure drawing of each one of my friends on each side with their own aura color

• ………..I thought it still needed work

Other Ideas

• A collage of figure drawings in different perspectives.

• Having a model represent different elements.

• “Line of Fate” showing how people are connected.

• Then I thought about Spirit Animals.

Body Painting

Guido Daniele

LexKim Joon

Craig Tracy

Models

5 female models They all have

different animals

Rebecca Nieves

Natives acknowledged that the bat was highly sensitive to their surroundings and for that reason was considered a symbol of awareness, dreaming, and vision.

Lindsey Dawson

Natives believe parrots show intelligence, good temperament, and a sense of international relations.

Parrots teach listening to all of nature and awakening to the language within using insight for more open communications.

Jasmine Lemus

Natives thought foxes encourages us to think outside of the box and use our intelligence in different, creative ways. The fox also brings us a message to try to approach our circumstances differently that we normally would.

Anna Rashbaum

Natives believe rabbits are highly social animals, displaying genuine feelings of happiness and affection. Vice versa, they can display aggression, jealousy, and hostility in their social

Myself

This power animal is a good inspiration for adding more color into your life and self-expression. Those who have the butterfly as a totem animal may be naturally inclined to express themselves openly, to reflect their colors into their environment.

Final Project

For my project I am considering using the figure drawing skills that I have learned over the years to depict my friends using animal metaphors that I choose for them. My project would thus be on how to depict

Artists on the Same wave length as me

These artists, from left to right, are Elizeabeth Beals, Ina Woolcott, Zakhar Krylov, and Laura Frisk.