Camille Butterfield

Throughout my life, my innermost thoughts have both empowered and paralyzed me, and I often wonder how ideas would appear if they adopted a tangible form. My concentration explores portraiture, combined with visual representations of ideas and emotions as auras emerging from each person. While processing private thoughts may seem like a very individual endeavor, it is an integral part of the human experience, and provides the foundation for interactions and unbreakable bonds between people.

As a child, a friend told me that each hair on my head represented one of my thoughts or memories. We’d tug gently on each other’s hair, asking, “Which thought is this?” and exchanging our stories. Inspired by this experience, I depict all my subjects without hair, and fill the space where their hair would be with whimsical interpretations of how their thoughts, ideas, and emotions might look. These abstract areas of my pieces let me explore a different set of technical painting skills, use texture and color in exciting ways, and release my creative side. I began with thinner paint and colored glazes to convey the fluid and fleeting nature of thoughts and ideas, but as l progressed, I experimented with thicker layers of paint to signify

more substantial thoughts. Though some of the designs seem sharp and geometric. l have crafted each “thought” freehand to emphasize the organic, raw, imperfect. yet beautiful quality of our cognitive and emotional energies. From the shoulders down, my subjects“ bodies seem to drip off the canvas, because as we contemplate the worlds within our minds. our bodies fade away. Without hair, the faces appear both unique and similar, because this universal part of the human experience both defines us as individuals and and connects us as a whole.