Looking back through my art over the years, I seem to be most influenced by the world around me – producing what I know and see. This is seen from a young age drawing mostly nature and figures. I do this because I am most inspired by humanity. I love observing how people move and react within themselves and with one another. I love to listen to people’s stories and learn about other people’s perceptions and levels of awareness. You can learn so much about yourself by learning about and observing others. This is why I have always been interested in the arts. To me, the arts are a way to express yourself unconventionally – to tell a universal story in the way only you know how.
Since the arts have been a huge influence in my life, dance and performing affects the way I view art. You see this through my focus on dancers and how movement and strength can be utilized to create another world. I keep coming back to rendering dance in one way or another because it is such a huge part of my life. I love connecting my two worlds and learning how to translate one into the other. I immensely appreciate the human body and the lines and forms it creates by simply existing in its own capacity. So much personality is brought out simply through people’s movements and I love exploring this. Even when you are still, you are distinctly you. The best examples of this are life drawings. So many stories can come about from these images just from the figures’ body language. People are so diverse that virtually every different person reading this can walk away with a different meaning. It is truly incredible how much can be said about a person without any spoken dialogue.
It is with this last statement where most of my art comes from. I allow the viewer to create their own narrative about my work – letting people create their own visions of who I might be. Although I want my messages to viewers to sometimes be ambiguous, that does not mean I don’t have personal meanings when I create work. Often times I plan a lot of my concepts out ahead of time in sketchbooks by idea mapping and sketching thumbnails. I focus a lot on generating multiple ideas and writing those down for continual inspiration. Many times it is text that inspires my ideas for artwork, whether it be from quotes I find, lyrics stuck in my head, or conversational dialogue.
One of my favorite quotes comes from the musical RENT. “The opposite of war isn’t peace; it’s creation.” This quote is so accurate! The act of creation is a powerful one – it allows for humanity to have immense power. I believe that life is a creative process where we are all figuring out who we are and what inspires us. It is whether we tap into this creative potential where we will find our lives the most fulfilling. Like my art, life should be organized chaos with a focus on multiple areas, instead of only one specific point. My art is full of anomalies: I love color, but I tend to work a lot in charcoal or graphite; I love simple and expressive form, but a lot of my pieces are very detail oriented. In my artwork, I try to not define myself as any one thing because I want to keep learning and creating new work.
I strive to be an advocate for all of the arts because they are all immensely important in people’s lives.
Sarah Kedzior 