Endnotes¹


Onora Best
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    Artwork

    1
    2
    3
    4
    5
    6
    Ribcage, Hipbones, Skull, Hand, Skull+Lavender
    Oil on canvas and artist board, watercolor on paper/ prints.
    Various

    Statement The original plan for my thesis was a series of oil paintings focusing on the imagery of bones and flowers. This was a chance to explore various ways to render this subject matter and experiment with a more textured style of painting. Over the course of the year, the series evolved into a collection in several respects. The end product is quite literally a collection of paintings, prints, and drawings. The scale shifts within the set invite the viewer to engage with the work more intimately and consider how each piece is not only a representation of some item not currently present, but also a collectible object on its own. But the series is also a collection of deeper meanings, self reflections, and personal associations. I grew sunflowers in my front yard from scratch when I was twelve, and there's been a patch of lavender growing next to my grandmother's front door for as long as I can remember. Paintings of skulls recall the tradition of vanitas still life, which serve as a reminder of mortality and the eventual victory of death over every living thing. The history of flower language gives symbolism to every flower, like the wonder and enchantment of lavender colored roses or the patience, prosperity, and good fortune of alliums.

    Student

    flowers, feel, bones, pelvis, hip bones, piece, painting, impasto, painted, skull, color, thinking, life, watercolor, red, canvas, treated, mind, gender, painter
    “When I started with the idea for the show, it was just bones and flowers because of the aesthetics of it. But each piece has kind of like evolved to have like a little deeper meaning other than just literally bones and flowers.”
    “...that's something I'm working on—not treating canvases as something precious, which I think is why I had so much fun with the little flower surveys because I wasn't treating them as precious.”
    "So I'm an art major with, like, 90% of the requirements to be a chemistry major.”
    “When I still thought I was going to be an engineering major I took the ‘Art of Watercolor’ or something like that. It's got a longer title, but it was a watercolor class. It was like a lot of observational drawings and then putting color on top of the drawings and stuff like that. I always liked to draw throughout high school. But my first kind of formal training was after I kind of made the switch to do chemistry and art, the chemistry part fell off.”
    “I have a thesis playlist, well okay, I have three but one of them is just combining the other two. Because in my mind when I started working on it, it was like kind of, there were two parts to it–the bones part and then the flowers part. So I've got a playlist called ‘Hey cemetery, what's your story?’”
    Endnotes¹

    Onora Best
  • *
    •

    Artwork

  • 1
    •
  • 2
    •
  • 3
    •
  • 4
    •
  • 5
    •
  • 6
    •
    Ribcage, Hipbones, Skull, Hand, Skull+Lavender
    Oil on canvas and artist board, watercolor on paper/ prints.
    Various

    Statement The original plan for my thesis was a series of oil paintings focusing on the imagery of bones and flowers. This was a chance to explore various ways to render this subject matter and experiment with a more textured style of painting. Over the course of the year, the series evolved into a collection in several respects. The end product is quite literally a collection of paintings, prints, and drawings. The scale shifts within the set invite the viewer to engage with the work more intimately and consider how each piece is not only a representation of some item not currently present, but also a collectible object on its own. But the series is also a collection of deeper meanings, self reflections, and personal associations. I grew sunflowers in my front yard from scratch when I was twelve, and there's been a patch of lavender growing next to my grandmother's front door for as long as I can remember. Paintings of skulls recall the tradition of vanitas still life, which serve as a reminder of mortality and the eventual victory of death over every living thing. The history of flower language gives symbolism to every flower, like the wonder and enchantment of lavender colored roses or the patience, prosperity, and good fortune of alliums.

    Student