Fascination Before Pain

Belle Hilton

ARTIST STATEMENT

My objective in creating this work was to portray pain through color. Pain is complex. We do not simply feel pain in any one objective form. Rather, we experience pain in a multitude of experiences and thoughts. Similarly, color can be expressed with complexity through variance in saturation, value, and hue.
For a little boy, a scraped knee is probably a common occurrence. I am sure that a toddler's first reaction would probably be tears, but a little boy has had too many scraped knees to be phased. Rather, he crouches down, rests his elbow on his other knee, and studies the damage. He becomes fascinated with the blood, the skin, and the biology that he has yet to understand. I wanted to show the hyper-awareness that pain brings, so I portrayed his knee in color. I did not use saturated colors because, although a scraped knee is painful, it is not a sharp pain, nor is it a pain that the boy would notice. However, the colors also bring the viewer's attention to the knee in a manner of focus similar to the little boy's focus.
I left the background abstract to bring focus on the little boy. I wanted it to look as if he was in his own little world. Therefore, I also cropped the image to be extremely zoomed in. I wanted it to look like he is absorbed in his knee.