This piece was made for a painting class and the prompt for the assignment was “history/current events”. I thought about history both as memories and as something that can sometimes be unreliable. Specifically, I thought about how anxiety and trauma can mess with memory and accurate recollection of events. I planned to make multiple images of human figures with animal or object heads to represent how distorted we can see ourselves, but only managed to create the wolf. The wolf is depicted eating butterflies, playing on the phrase “butterflies in my stomach,” but flipping it to be self-inflicted.
I have also included a few pages depicting my method for brainstorming ideas and colors, as well as some images of what the actual painting process looked like.
