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Artist Statement:

For my medium I chose to use a whiteboard and dry erase markers to create a mural. The aspect of this medium that I really wanted to explore was temporariness, or eraseability. Whiteboards are erasable. The things we write or draw on them are easily removed, accidentally, purposefully or by necessity. There one minute and gone the next. Each time they offer a clean slate and a fresh start.

The idea of temporariness also inspired the depiction of a sunset. Sunsets are also temporary. There one minute and gone the next. They signal the end of a day, and a chance to start over tomorrow. Subject isn’t the focus of this project, but it was interesting how well my subject fit in with the medium I was exploring.

One thing that I got from McCloud’s Show and Tell piece, was that you can use your subject to comment on the medium. He uses his comic book character to comment on comic books and their significance, and I took that and used a sunset to comment on the temporariness of the drawing itself.

 

I started the mural knowing I was going to erase it, but when the time came to actually erase, I had a really hard time doing it. Maybe it’s the fact that it took me 2 hours and 47 minutes to complete the mural, and a total of 2 minutes to completely erase it. When I got part way through erasing, I realized that I could play with the process of erasing itself, which resulted in this:

I was kind of kicking myself for not thinking of it sooner, because there were so many cool things I could have played with, but that’s part of art I guess, you live and you learn and you save good ideas for the next time.

When I chose it I didn’t realize that whiteboard art was a thing, but as I researched it more I realized that there are several other people who participate in this medium. I found this really cool blog: http://www.cubescrawls.com/ that is full of different whiteboard art projects. My favorite one that he did was a copy of 'Starry Night' by Van Gogh all with whiteboard markers. It was really cool to see what other people did with the medium, and I definitely see more whiteboard murals in my future.

~Brontë Campbell 

White Lilies

Artist Statement: 

I’ve always been fascinated with the WWII era of history. WWII affected the entire world, and as a result there are millions of stories and experiences that came out of it. Stories of the home front have always been interesting to me, so that’s what I wanted to write about. With that in mind, I decided to do a story about a war widow. Similar to The Veil, we wanted to tell a story from a perspective that isn’t often considered. I feel like there are so few stories about war widows, maybe because it’s a really sad a topic, or maybe it’s because people are more interested in what was going on overseas. 

Whatever the case, we decided to focus on the effect the war had on those who stayed home. In the preliminary research I did for my elevator pitch, I came across this story:  
  

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/for-wwii-soldiers-widow-a-60-year-mystery-finally-solved/  

From this came the basis of our story, one part history, one part romance and one part mystery. We decided to use D-Day as a major event in our story, because it is such a well-known event, as well as being a turning point in the war. We used this link for a lot of our information on D-Day:   

http://www.army.mil/d-day/ 

We also wanted to have some kind of symbol that tied the whole story together, so we decided to use the white lilies to do just that. White lilies are a symbol of chastity and virtue, and they are also popular funeral flowers. In our story, they are a symbol of Molly’s fidelity to Charlie and are also used foreshadow his death.

Overall I really enjoyed this project. It allowed me to look into a part of history that genuinely interests me, and gave me the chance to tell a story that I think is beautiful and important. I gained a greater appreciation for history itself, and I also realized how much history remains untold. It’s amazing how many different memories and stories people have of one event. I used to be a little bit frustrated by that because I always wanted to know what the one REAL story was. While working on this project, I realized that there is more than one real story, in fact there are millions of real stories about history. Every story and experience is real to the person it belongs to, and that was a wonderful lesson I was able to learn while doing this project. 

~Brontë Campbell