The Halloween Party
Author: Pippi Miller
Supervisors: Michael Greaves, Ed Hanfling
The Halloween Party
Pippi Miller
24 February 2023
Miller, P. (2023). The Halloween Party. (Unpublished dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts). Otago Polytechnic | Te Pūkenga, New Zealand. https://doi.org/10.34074/thes.6067
Abstract
My studio project, the final exhibition for which will also be named The Halloween Party, is a mix of individual works and a picture-book. The individual works consist of oil paintings on canvas, and gouache paintings on paper. The oil paintings deal with the figurative, although there are abstract moments to be found within them. Whether or not the figure is present, the paintings are at heart about people. Their more obviously perceivable subjects, however, move between the domestic, portraiture, and the outside environment. The individual gouache works are painted in an illustrative style, a way of painting that is suited to gouache. While they deal with the figurative, are not as realistic as the oil works. Their subject is also people, but those people are portrayed in much more fantastical ways. Both the gouache and oil paintings are accompanied by words, which are written like captions under the image. The words direct and alter the meaning of the image.
My picture-book will be scanned and put together into a functional book for the final exhibition. However, each individual image (or page) is hand-painted gouache onto paper, much like the gouache individual images. Similar again to the gouache individual images, the style of the paintings leans to the illustrative, but like the oil works, abstract moments can be found within the figurative. The colour-palette of the picture book tends more toward bright, bold colours than my individual works.
The picture-book follows a girl named Clarisse, as she collects objects she finds fascinating, and attempts to show them to her parents, who are both blithely busy with their work. Hurt, Clarisse runs away, but gets cold and lonely, so eventually goes back home, where her parents have not noticed her running away, but have made her a delicious dinner. The book investigates the magic of childhood, as well as the feelings of sadness, hurt, and loneliness often a part of being a child. It examines the imperfect nature of parenting, and how gestures of love can so often be missed or misunderstood by those they are intended for. As a whole, my studio project is about love, small moments that are actually big, and paint.
Keywords: portraits, painting, gouache painting, children in art, parenting in art, picture books, exhibitions, Otago (N.Z.)
See images of Pippi's work on Flickr
Licence
A copy of the dissertation is publicly available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
