Kai Williams ART 110 Artist Essay
Info Block:
Artist: Jerome Reed III
Media: Artist and Designer
Instagram: @master_hugooo
- My older brother, Jerome Reed III, was born in San Diego in 1995 in National City, CA. He was inspired to do art and follow it as a career from the pictures of his dad drew while he was in jail. It was a picture of Batman and superman becoming realistic to him getting him going. After his father passed away, he moved to Los Angeles at the age of 13 and grew up there ever since. He would always carry a drawing book but later lost after moving it around. He did not start putting in effort until he left for college in 2013, attending The University of California, Santa Cruz. His interest was in Renaissance Art with its realism, which was kind of his whole style of drawing. His medium was graphite but worked in mediums such as screen printing, wood blocking, sculpting, metalwork, and even interactive art pieces that require coding.
2. He likes to use a lot of concepts and symbols in his pieces. The line represented the image of his body, crafting out his emotions and frustrations. The rhythm represents the sketching and design using landscape, shapes, and sketches to show the importance of the painting. The texture is smooth and immersive with the white strings creating pressure and anxiety. The colors are black and gray, becoming empty and heart-rending with so much going on in life. The cadence represents how much is on the person’s mind figuring out what the next move is to solve problems that are in the way. It is a straight painting becoming black-and-white in its appearance. Also, it is large and massive, becoming a gut reaction to me based on the tragedies and problems we see in today’s society.
3. The painting is about during a time where life was rough for him. He was inspired in the piece called “shriek,” painted by Edvard Munch. The lines behind the head represented the frequency of sadness and despair. The painting together represents the frequency that people go through. Our emotions and perceptions of things that happen correlate to the frequency and energy, which emanates from those feelings we have. The artwork is a creation of that in its purpose. The artists’ mind was on the events and challenges that were troubling him at the time, causing him to feel depressed. He was thinking about the experiences he faced and the problems on his mind becoming frustrated. Ideas he was trying to explore were life, hardships, depression, and anxiety from the piece.
4. Synthesis means combining ideas forming either a theory or belief system, whether the environment, art, modern life, etc. The formal nature and artist’s ideas resonate with my ideas, perceptions, and perspectives by visualizing the piece and trying to describe what is going on depending on the situation. It resonates with me by thinking about my own life’s experiences with challenges and hardships standing in my way to accomplishing what I want to achieve in life. Yes, I believe that the things from my personal and academic experience resonate with the painting. Personally, the piece highlights the mental and physical pain people feel from getting through life each day. Academically, having high expectations of yourself and achieving them is hard.
