Art student Miguel Miranda’s artwork was displayed in the Shadow Box during the first three weeks of the semester depicting realism and abstract forms and drawings.
The art drawings that Miranda selected extended into a broad variety of different mediums, forms, styles and techniques with each piece.
Miranda said that he always enjoyed working with artwork that had a sense of realism to them, such as portraits and still life drawings.
In his more recent work, though, he began to take on concepts of abstraction as well.
Miranda expressed his enjoyment of experimenting and working with different types of mediums, and creating each drawing in a different way.
Miranda said that “whatever [he] is going through” reflects in his work whether or not he “wants it to or is aware of it”. His experiences subconsciously affects his work and how they turn out.
The art works differ with each drawing you look at; one drawing shows mannequin figures using cold colors, another is a multi-colored portrait of a man, two other are abstract drawings with illusions of shapes and forms.
“Most of my works…even though they look small, they take a lot of time” he said.
Studying for a double major, art and art new media, Miranda had always been into the arts, which started from an early age.
He has been drawing since the age of seven or eight years old, then living in Mexico. He began by drawing replicates from photography and emulating the different shades to a picture.
“Every work is [from] a different time in my life,” Miranda said referring to the different styles of the artwork he had distinctly created over the months and years.
“Self introspection” is a figure drawing from his figure class last semester as they studied the human form, the muscles and skeleton.
“There are different energetic layers in the body, layers we don’t see”, Miranda said. The work was an experiment, uncovering the many layers we have as individuals that we aren’t aware of.
“It was my first time drawing with ink like that,” said Miranda.
Another drawing in the shadow box was the “Colobist,” the name which puts the words color and cubistic together.
Using color pencils is “not as easy as watercolor or paint,” Miranda said, going on to say that the drawing took him 20 hours to complete.
His uses of medium range from oil pastels, charcoal, ink, colored pencils to create works of still life, abstract, realism and figure drawings.
Working in a classroom gives students a limited amount of time to create and produce content, sometimes even more than one drawing.
Miranda said that the fast paced environment keeps him from getting “trapped” into trying to perfect each individual work. “It helps you to keep developing.”
“Some of my best drawings [were] in like three, two minutes because [when] I’m in a hurry, I get the shape and I get it accurate,” Miranda said.
Miranda submitted his artwork in the American River Review, as well as participating in the Student Show this semester.
