Featured Artist Jennifer Wang

Artist Jennifer Wang’s intimate and timeless portraits of the homeless are inspired by her desire to reach out with a message of humility and humanity. Learn more about her by visiting her website.

 

 

It is undeniable that within the human mind there is a certainty in which we can all use to affix ourselves to the world and to each other. Something within a soul that loves with no boundaries and respects the existence of everything in the course of nature. That is sympathy.

 

 

What inspired me to draw was never a person; it was the feeling of a lost connection between people. It is well known that nature is innately divided, but humans have gradually become so lost in entitlement, politics, and insignificant opinions that we have subliminally divided ourselves into a pervasive realm of shallow judgement.

 

 

I am currently a freshman university student in Colorado studying Biochemistry. I began art at a very young age, stemming from replications of cartoons I saw on television onto dingy composition notebooks. There was a part of me that yearned so badly to delve into realism, and it was not until I was fifteen years old in high school that my dabbling in portraits became a passion.

 

 

I started a homeless collection, where I drew a range of homeless portraits inspired by the photography of United Kingdom photographer Lee Jeffries. Drawing these portraits humbled me into appreciating all aspects of my well-off life and turned my focus into making bystanders feel the same humility through sympathizing with the faces they drive mindlessly by every day.

 

 

By using charcoal on all my drawings, I like to create a sense of dustiness, like a timeless tranquility that frames the subject in their own light.

 

 

I then use a gold medium, whether it be gold foil, paint, or ink, to brightly juxtapose the portrait and fabricate a sort of abstract representation of individuality. For example, a gold crown made of leaves and twigs, or gold antlers made of tree trunk.

 

 

The goal is to indirectly depict a community of people we subliminally characterize as “lower” than us into bright individuals who are exactly the same as you!

 

 

This led to a project I drew last year as I was applying for university, where I pushed myself to fulfill a dream of drawing on a big canvas. “Nature in Three” is four feet wide and four feet tall and discusses an extension of my values from the homeless project—a realization that (as crude as it sounds) humans are animals, and I, just like everyone else, am part of this earth and abide by the laws of nature.

 

 

It is important, in my opinion, to recognize the fragility of our primitive state because when we strip ourselves down from technology and material wealth, we are as barebacked a species as any other living thing. I just hope understanding that would help others develop a sympathy for those vastly different from them and make for more amicable judgement. In this way, “Nature in Three” is pretty direct in symbolizing the connection of humans with nature, our ability to live in harmony with it, and therefore our ability to live with each other.

 

 

Realistically, my goal in this lifetime is to learn how to balance a science degree with my passion for drawing. Even if my art reaches no one, I will live content knowing that it helped me individually appreciate the great works of life—regardless of how stressed or depressed my own life made me—and hopefully help the people around me become a little nicer as well.

 

Artist Jennifer Wang invites you to follow her on Instagram and Facebook.

 

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