Madeleine Termondt – See Yourself, Know Yourself

This piece was created using Clip Studio Paint as a part of a series of artworks I am working on as a way to explore how I could build a lasting sense of happiness in my own life. This work focuses on the acceptance of the self: through this piece, I tried to focus on accurately representing my own positive and negative traits, drawing them as people you could look in the eye as if to have a conversation. Moving from the upper left to the lower right, the characters represent my more cynical, observative self, my excited, knowledge-loving student self, my more wild, enthusiastic artist self, my tendency towards social and emotional isolation, my actual physical appearance, my love of listening/talking to people, the parts of myself I tend to ignore or have not yet discovered, my tendencies towards extreme self-judgment, and my tendency to view everything as passing or transitional. The lighting and colors on these loosely drawn characters are harsh and bright, something done to demonstrate how I hope to bring these different aspects of myself to light. The characters are also contained in a Rubik’s cube orientation to represent the interchangeability of these different aspects of myself: all cubes on a Rubik’s cube can move interchangeably, and can never see all the faces of a Rubik’s cube at once. In doing so, I hoped to represent how different parts of myself manifest differently in different situations while also implying at there being greater depth to myself than the parts that I can see currently.