Exploring New York City’s Wild Side through Oil Painting – Wriley

Artist's Statement

I was raised in Brooklyn, and I am a senior at Elisabeth Irwin High School, where I’ve gone to school since 9th grade. Having grown up with an adventurous and artistic family, I have had a life-long infatuation with nature, science, and art. In college, I hope to pursue an education in Ecology and Wildlife Biology and to continue using art as a way to understand the world. When not at school, I enjoy sauntering through Prospect Park, watching Miyazaki movies, and working on an array of art projects ranging from embroidery to oil paintings.

My Senior Project began with me getting on a train going down to Georgia to begin an 8 week solo backpacking trip on the Appalachian Trail. However, Covid-19 forced me to turn around and abandon my plan. So instead of finding nature through immersion in wilderness, I decided to find and explore nature in my backyard and neighborhood through oil painting. Many of my paintings are of birds I saw on walks in my neighborhood or while sitting on my porch. Other paintings feature more mythical subjects — human figures with wings and talons, giant songbirds attacking churches. One day, I went to the park and found a view with no buildings, another day I painted the little stand outside the restaurant down the block that has been selling produce and beer during quarantine. But all in all, these paintings are exploring nature in one way or another. My paintings of birds depict the ‘nature’ as I saw it; the paints are records of something I observed. Amongst my bird paintings there are some that are more naturalistic (hopefully..) and some that are more stylistic. I spent a lot of time doing these more representational paintings, but I also dabbled in allegorical painting a bit. My paintings of figures with wings are attempting to explore modern humans’ alienation from nature. This idea of alienation from nature came from John Berger’s essay Why Look At Animals, where he argues that modern society has so far removed humans from our animal counterparts, that any look (in the deeper sense) at animals can’t be anything more than a commentary on our distance and dissonance. I didn’t realize at first, but my senior project experience — including planning, preparing and cancelling my 8 week solo — was a reaction to this idea of humanity’s separation from nature.

My medium has consistently been oil paint. With my small paintings, I often jumped right into them, doing the drawing, then underpainting, then overpainting without sketching it out first. For all of my paintings I have really built the habit of doing a thorough underpainting. It seems obvious, but now I have the experience to know this to be true: a strong underpainting makes the rest of the process much easier. Otherwise, I wasn’t making up any revolutionary techniques.

Overall, this project has been a great exploration into both oil painting and the natural world around me. I learned a lot about who I want to be as an artist and how I look at the world as a scientist.

You should be able to access the gallery above (it may take a few minutes to load). You can also use this link https://www.artsteps.com/view/5ed01da0ee9d76564b341fda