Spotlight on Artist Audrey Paransky

Welcome to The Elective’s digital art museum, dedicated to the incredible work of AP Arts students. Each week we highlight a work or series created in one of the AP Arts concentrations—AP 2-D Art and Design, 3-D Art and Design, and AP Drawing (the AP Program also offers Art History and Music Theory)—as well as a statement from the artist (and, occasionally, their teacher).

From the first cave paintings to contemporary breakthroughs in virtually reality, art, in all its forms, has been a crucial way for people to process, make sense of, comment on, and grapple with the world around them. In 2020, there is a lot to process and grapple with—and AP Art students have risen to the challenge. The work many of them submitted in their final portfolios is explicitly of the moment, from commentary on the covid-19 pandemic to the celebration of people of color to the nature of heroism in perilous times.

The work is often challenging and provocative but always insightful, inspiring, and expansive.

This week we feature a digital painting made by Audrey Paransky from Crescenta Valley High School in La Crescenta, CA..

Here’s Audrey's statement on the work:

“Through my theme 'Luxury in Excess,' I wanted to explore the complications of wealth. Here, I wanted to show how excessive wealth can rob a person of their identity. The woman has clearly gone on a shopping spree. Her face was intentionally omitted to trigger curiosity about her character. Without her face, the audience can only associate the shopper with her bags. The bags, her symbols of wealth, have become her only definable feature. They are her identity. The empty, concave horizon inspired the title. It conveys that nothing can limit her shopping. Her character becomes synonymous with carefree spending with little regard for social stigma. Her shallowness makes her face irrelevant.

My composition aims to direct the viewers’ eyes through my piece before finally settling on the bags. Rendering the legs more realistically contrasts with the other aspects, which makes the audience initially drawn to the legs. The perspective and foreshortening exaggerate the legs to give the illusion of movement, which helps drive attention upward from the legs before fanning out to the bags. The bags were initially designed with different colors, but I later simplified my palette to remove distractions and unify the piece.”

And here are a few more works from Audrey’s portfolio:

Student statements are lightly edited for length and clarity.