Camyljah Rose, painter and illustrator

My work gives visual context to perception. A piece of our human experience is the ability to create context and correlations between two dissimilar ideas. In particular, my current body of work explores the commonalities identity and relationship have with flora and color. More recently, the work I have created centers the idea of “people of color” as a way to separate skin tone from the vibrancy of our human experience.

 

History has been written attempting to capture and make something fleeting permanent. Life, in all its forms, is transient. Paintings, handwritten notes, photographs, and videos were created to document the idea that our lives are important, if only to one observer. The key player in this process is perception. Where one person may see something meaningless and mundane, another may see a cherished and beloved memory–precisely recalling how that moment made them feel. So, taking cues from surrealism and magical realism artists, I explore ideas such as love, beauty, strength, and existence itself using personal and cultural symbols.

 

Flowers, in particular, have a similar quality in their necessity to life, beauty, and transience while maintaining a relationship to every other living thing in some capacity. The symbolic meaning given to individual species and colors assists in building the narrative each painting conveys. My work will continue to explore perception, identity, and sentience in a historical context. Hopefully, my contribution can start an internal conversation that allows one to confront these themes in his or her own life.