AP 2-D
Pleasantville High School｜Pleasantville, New York
Lucas
CAptan
Dimensions: 7” x 19”｜Materials: Procreate, IPad, Apple Pencil｜Processes: Contrast between saturation of nature & monochrome industry destroying beauty｜Curatorial Note: This portfolio has powerful design works that amplify the student's interest in environmental issues.
Student statement
Student statement
Ever since I was young, I would see glaciers sinking on my television and begged my father to take a vacation to Alaska to “see the glaciers before they melt.” I grew up knowing how the environment was being destroyed, and it was just a fact for me. It felt inevitable that all these issues with the world would eventually lead to something awful, so I hid. Lost in the fantasy worlds of video games and television, I gained a sense of comfort from the dangers of a world approaching its end. As time has passed, however, I’ve grown to fully comprehend the importance of these issues and how we can change them. We need to stand up and make a difference. Too much media created to encourage people to help the world often portrays only the awful aspects that ultimately dishearten viewers, myself included. Invoking fear in an audience doesn’t get people to make a difference. The audience needs to be inspired, motivated, and moved by something that makes a lasting impact. That’s what I wanted to do with my portfolio.
Merging my love for fantasy worlds with my passion for environmental activism created the message of my artworks. I took a fantastical element of living seed characters and placed them in the real world to highlight how nature is affected by modern society. The entirety of nature is personified in the protagonist as it narrowly avoids acid rain, swims across polluted waters, and outruns the ever-growing industrial landscape.
The artwork accepted for this exhibit encapsulates the entire portfolio in a straightforward image. I created an imposing and powerful force that devastated the forest using industrial imagery like the woodchipper and the smoke. Finding the perfect placement of each element took many hours to develop an idea that was conveyed instantly. People usually read from the left to the right, so I placed the woodchipper facing to the left with the smoke moving right to left to emphasize the feeling of disruption.
Color plays a lot in the final piece as well. The vividness of nature contrasted with the lifeless monochromatic palette of the smoke adds a stark comparison in the composition, illustrating the destruction of beauty seen in the forest. A cross-section of the tree is even seen in perfect white as it is mangled by the woodchipper, which further cements the death of the monochromatic palette. Additionally, instead of the machine producing simple wood chips, the woodchipper creates more smoke that fuels the ever-growing wall of pollutants they push onto the natural land. I did this to highlight the ties between the smoke and the woodchipper and give a reason for the smoke's appearance while also showing how the tree's beauty transforms into bland additions to the industry.
Sustained lnvestigation
How would plants interact with the polluted world if they were alive? I used this idea to create a story around living seeds & their adventure through a polluted land depicted through graphic design pieces. I created these pieces to spread awareness of our ecosystem's problems and frame the narrative of an adventure.
Lucas Captan
