GRAPHIC DESIGN
STEPHANIE ZELLER
SELECTED TRADITIONAL WORKS
THE DATA PROJECT
Working from a composed and cropped image of Arctic ice thickness data out of Los Alamos National Labs, which I color-encoded using one of environmental science's most popular (and ineffective) colormaps, this painting is the first in a series of data-driven, impressionist-style, impasto pieces. Standing at 5' x 7', the work's bodily size and gestural mark-making challenge the viewer to confront the work and what it stands for. I intend this series to ask questions about how we interact with screen-driven visuals, and how we respond differently to a work of great depth of color and complexity of form in the real world, whose composition references imagery increasingly familiar to us all. What does this colormap mean to us? What conclusions do we jump to about the content? How can our data be made more human, more visceral, more real?
Created over the course of one semester, Fall 2019.
NATURAL STUDIES
These studies are a series of oil paintings inspired by the natural world. They are all relatively small, from 12"x12" to roughly 24" x 12", and express the peace I find in our exquisite, brilliantly vibrant universe.
Created over the course of two years, 2017-2019.
BARRIERS
Nearing the end of a difficult semester full of doubt and many heavy experiences from my past weighing on my mind, I created this series of nine 12" x 12" paintings expressing my wrestle with undercurrents of turmoil paired with overtures of composure.
Created with oil pastel, acrylic, and oil paint in the Spring of 2019.
FLEURS DU MAL
Following a life-threatening accident that forced my reprise from school for one semester, I received many lovely bouquets of flowers from concerned friends and family. Unable to do much else, I set a few aside to paint as an act of rebellion against an oncoming depression. For this reason, they are Fleurs du Mal—flowers of evil, flowers with unfortunate association yet temporally positive influences.
Lemon Jelly, Lady Madonna, Plastic Soldiers, Your New House. Watercolor and micron pen, Fall 2016.
AWAKE
This series was, at the time, a foray into new use of color and negative space in an exploration of trauma and cognitive dissonance—furniture in the dark room of your subconscious.
Close Encounters, Obstinate Impasse, Conscious Awareness. Oil and Acrylic on canvas, Fall 2017.
WEST
A work in progress, this commissioned painting draws inspiration from the west Texas Davis Mountains and my time camping alone in the outlands of Texan desert. I wanted to make a painting as colorful and expressive as those peaks appeared on frosty January mornings.
Oil on Canvas, 2019-in progress
STRATEGY
This chess set was built as a Christmas present for a boy in my life who plays nearly obsessively. I painted the board from scratch, bought pieces of crown molding, stained and lacquered and assembled them before finishing with weighted chess pieces.
Acrylic house paint, primer, lacquer, wood stain, MDF wood, pine crown molding, plywood. Christmas 2017.
TRANSMEDIA ZINE SELECTED PAGES
As a class project, we were given random phrases and told to produce miniature zines inspired by those phrases. My phrase was "Abstraction is a Form of Decadence." Overlaying the most decadent prose I had yet been exposed to, Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and The Damned, I created these pages from printed photographs, layered acrylic paint and photoshop manipulation. Printing the photos in black in white, taken from various magazines, I painted over them with colors of my choice, then scanned the paintings into photoshop and worked over them again with the paint tool, creating pieces rich with nuance and mild abstraction of the female face—an indulgence in beauty and decadence.
Fall 2016
LARGE SCALE
These two paintings are the same size, both 4' x 8'. Both deal with similar themes: barrier-making, control and lack thereof, underlying turmoil overwritten by flat color fields and complex, interlacing forms.
2018-2019, oil, spraypaint, acrylic on canvas.
ACCIDENTS HAPPEN
Following a life-threatening accident, much of my art dealt with both childhood and renewed trauma. Both of these pieces touch on the raw nature of renewed trauma, and on the difficulty of, rather than "getting over" it, incorporating it into who I am—understanding my brain for how it has changed through this process of recovery and learning to live with the consequences, both positive and negative.
Untitled, Untitled, Spring 2019, oil on canvas
PROCESSION
A piece I made directly in the wake of my accident, Procession illustrates my reckoning with real and deep depression, and my fear of never being able to recover my prior vibrancy and lust for life. On the right—rather than sadness, emptiness, a lack of. On the left—piercing disturbance of color, life and emotion.
Oil and oil marker on canvas, 2016.
DENIM
My denim project was a brief stint of my online arts business. I bought high quality, slightly used jackets, painted their backs and resold them for money to help out with school costs.
Levi's denim jackets, black and white fabric paint, 2018
MISC OIL
A collection of little projects in oil throughout the last few years.
OLD WORKS
These works were all created prior to 2017. The first, a class assignment inspired by a collage we made for a prior project: The Green Light, acrylic and modge-podged colored pencil on paper on canvas. The second: my first attempt using oil—a forest landscape for my parents' bedroom. Oil on canvas. Third: Nostalgia Stronger than Knowledge, a high school workbook watercolor with a quote from my most dear philosopher at the time, Albert Camus.
The last: an in-progress class assignment to create a box with illusionistic patterns. Micron pen and sharpie on paper.