Actum by Ayodeji Okuleye

MEDIUM: Digital Illustration

DESCRIPTION: In “Actum,” I was trying to convey the sense of a single path that humans follow. The path starts from the left, and as you get further from the foreground, it slowly leads off into the right side, in order to convey a sense of distance and show an unclear starting point and ending point. By having a model walking on the path, the audience does not know whether he has been on this path for a long time or a short time. I was drawing a parallel between humanity and this model because if you were to observe anyone at a random point in their life, you wouldn’t always know where and how they started or where and how they would end.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT: Actum, Latin for “path,” is helping me demonstrate the man beginning to walk on a path to somewhere unknown. As humans, we usually follow a path somewhere, and that path is governed by the circumstances we are placed in. I use Latin titles to draw a connection to my love of Latin and my past experiences learning and being involved in Latin. I came across this idea, thinking about a way to convey a human walking on a path and mix both nature and abstract aspects into my piece. I love rendering nature scenes and putting an abstract twist on them. I feel like it is important to be able to connect with nature, as one of my favorite landscape artists, Thomas Cole, once said: “To walk with nature as a poet is the necessary condition of a perfect artist.” And I reflect on this quote anytime I do a piece of work that deals with real-life and nature itself. On the other hand, the abstract pieces of my art allow me to have arbitrary choices that allow me to show some self-expression that is implemented in my work. “Actum” is less abstract than most of my other pieces; however, it conveys a more rabid sense of realism and has very few abstract elements to it. The theme of a multitude of my works is the mix of multimedia realism and the abstract, and I occasionally mix Sci-fi with the abstract.

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