Trypophobia and Painting

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Our eyes allow us to remain alert and get precise understandings of where certain threats are. They are quick to identify things that are out of place, that seem dangerous or maybe delicious, and all in all, just let us know what is up right in front of us. There are certain sights that bring me a lot of peace, and there are certain sights that make all the hair on my neck stand up. Basically everyone in my house has some level of trypophobia, which is phobia of like small bunched together holes. I get super grossed out because my immediate association and primal thought process is seeing holes and imagining them in flesh, like a bunch of tiny bot fly entrances on a small animal's back. It repulses me, random sets of holes gross me out, though things like honey combs are fine. I never really know what is gonna gross me out or not, so I tried to avoid weird groupings of holes in general, but I used to be way worse. That is, however, until I started painting and found myself looking at and creating works of art composed of fine small circular details, the kind that would usually make all my stomach acid turn to cheese.


In highschool I got really into making abstract paintings from acrylic paint. I incorporated many different techniques in my process, but one two that I LOVED were simply blowing on paintings to make the paints swell and mix, and using my fingers or a small brush to sprinkle little bits of paint on my works. I one day was washing paint off my hands and decided to just flick a little of the murky water onto my wet globs of gesso and paint, and noticed that it just left little holes in them, no color since it was just water, but a landing imprint from the droplets. At first they grossed me out, these weird little craters on the face of my paintings, but the more I looked at them, the more they grew on me. I love little details, I always get so happy when I am able to zoom into one of my paintings and see a bunch of smaller things that are not super noticeable from far away, but add to the complexity and appeal of the overall work. I began to add them more and more, these little dents that gave color blocks a bit more texture. I adore contrast in my works of art, and something as small as having one section having the little indents as a detail while the others do not are just little fun things that people would occasionally notice and point out, a little treat to the keen eye.





My hatred for small bunches holes is still around, and I don’t go out of my way to look at works of art that use it as their most prominent feature, but through art and allowing myself to view this thing that filled me with primal disgust as something that is able to artistically enchanting has really eased up my horror. People are able to reassociate traumatic or gross things with positive experiences, and those experiences alter the information that our eyes work with. As we have discussed a lot in class, our eyes are often one of the first things that notice the world around us, it is considered one of the higher and more important senses. Whatever conclusions it makes greatly affects the way we interact with what we are viewing. Our brain takes information that we have gathered over the course of our lives and shoots it back at us whenever we interact with something. For me, my brain's association with holes was body torment, so it horrified me. But as I grew more comfortable with it due to my artistic experiences, my brain is not so quick to view an image with holes with disgust, it is more likely to consider the context or what exactly I'm seeing and then decide if it should gross me out or not, and that consideration time usually is just long enough for me to be able to move on from it.











Here are some of my paintings that use the little splash indents in ‘em! If you look carefully, you might be able to see the dots and indents c:


Comments

  1. Jonathan Brumberg-KrausMay 12, 2020 at 9:03 AM

    Nice connections between what you described in writing here and your paintings.

    ReplyDelete

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