By Lauren Farberman
Staff Writer
Mira Costa junior Lindsay Thomasson is utilizing social media to share her artwork and connect with other artists through her Instagram account @artbylid.
After growing up in a family of artists, with her grandma and aunt being painters, her mother working as a graphic designer and her brother currently majoring in art at Ferris University in Michigan, Thomasson says she has gained a true appreciation for art.
“Art is something that I have always been around growing up,” Thomasson said. “My family has always been supportive of my art.”
This year, Thomasson is enrolled in Advanced Placement Studio Art at Costa. In the fall, AP Studio Art students had to decide on a concentration or theme for their work, and Thomasson chose distortion as her concentration for the year. Distortion art is the abstraction of realistic artworks to convey a certain emotion or idea.
“I started out wanting to focus on mental thoughts and visualizing them,” Thomasson said. “When I started looking online, I came across the idea of distortion and thought it would be interesting to interpret. I wanted to portray the physical appearance of someone with distorted thoughts, like if your physical appearance reflected your mind.”
Thomasson must use the theme of distortion in 12 separate pieces that she creates throughout the school year for her AP Studio Art class portfolio that is used as the assessment for AP class credit.
“Distortion of the mind is thought of to be something internal, so to show external distortion in my artwork was something I thought would be interesting,” Thomasson said.
The past year, Thomasson began to post pictures of her artwork on her personal Instagram account. Thomasson thought her artwork would be better appreciated on an account solely dedicated to the art, so on Feb. 27, she created the Instagram account @artbylid, she said.
“With my separate Instagram account dedicated to my art, I am able to connect with other artists and able to get support from them,” Thomasson said. “People will direct message me or comment on the photos and say nice things or ask questions, and you can make friends with people who share the same passion as you. Knowing that my art is appreciated has been a very reaffirming experience.”
Thomasson’s artwork is normally an image of a face from the internet that she distorts. After the distortion, she roughly sketches the face out using water color, pen or colored pencil. However, now that she has finished her distortion concentration, she plans to focus on other styles of art that she will also post on her Instagram.
“The distortion series really helped me to develop and work on my personal style,” Thomasson said.
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