Spotlight on...Jackie Laryea

Author: Jodie Zhang and Lauren Smith

The Middlebury Campus: How long have you been creating art?

Jackie Laryea: I've been drawing since I was seven, so it's been more than half of my life. My sister Alice was always drawing and doing art and because I wanted to be around her, I started to draw too. Then, my sophomore year in high school, all of a sudden I realized I was good at art, so I started doing more.

The Campus: What sort of materials do you use?

Jackie: I use pencils and Prismacolors, which are oil-based colored pencils, oil pastels, acrylic and oil sometimes when I'm at home and I have the time. I stretch my own canvases when I can.

The Campus: What do you try to capture with your art?

Jackie: I really like capturing human emotion and experiences. I learned to draw by doing a lot of portraits. I started by taking pictures of my friends. A lot of people say that my art is pretty schizophrenic - it's all over the place. I do have a style, but I don't only do abstract or surrealism or realism. I don't stick to just one style. Artists go through phases, and I guess this is my phase - I'm doing everything I like. I don't think artists should be limited to only one style of art. That won't help develop your own style. Before Dali became a surrealist, he was a realist painter. It's a process.

I am drawn to a lot of different things, or a moment that I really want to capture and I won't care if it doesn't fit into what I would normally consider my "style." Art is just an expression of who you are, and artists have a lot of things they want to express.

The Campus: So you work mostly from photographs?

Jackie: It seems like all of my drawings are from photographs, but all my paintings are original - they're all from my head. With my drawings, it's more about the emotion and with my paintings its more about the color and conveying emotion through color.

The Campus: What other sort of forms of artistic expression are you interested in?

Jackie: Well, I'm taking my first acting class this semester. It's a really different form of expression. Acting is different, but when you sit down and read a play, you go through a process. A play is artwork because you're trying to reach a resolution and there are layers and layers. Like when starting a painting, I start one without knowing where you might be going. There are so many layers underneath the finished product. People don't really see the process.

The Campus: Does the place that you're from have a lot to do with your art?

Jackie: A lot of my paintings have to do with who I am and where I'm from. But I think people expect artists, especially black artists, to only do paintings that have to do with being black or being a woman and that's a limiting attitude. There's so much more to me than that. Every single piece of artwork is me. It has my emotion. In most of my drawings, someone is suffering. They have a lot to do with things that I've gone through. But I don't think I need to fit this quota of being a "black artist."

The Campus: Any specific artistic inspirations?

Jackie: Um, Dali, Picasso and a modern artist, Ora Tamir. Jazz musician John Coltrane inspires me. Music really inspires me, especially music without words. Sometimes I think words disrupt my train of thought, whereas music without words, like jazz, puts you in this completely different state of mind. Unless it's vocal jazz, which is really cool too, you don't have this voice telling you what's going on. After listening to "After the Rain" by Coltrane, I produced a painting that reflected exactly what was in my head when I was listening to the song.

The Campus: Do you see your art going in a certain direction?

Jackie: I think I'm really going to get into African Art. I just recently started doing art about black people, black women. I'm 19-years-old. I've gone through a lot that makes me proud to be who I am. I have a grip on my identity, and I feel ready. Ever since I've come to Middlebury, all my art has been about being black and about being a woman. I could never have done this type of work before because I didn't yet know who I was. Now I'm discovering this and it's coming out in my art.