This is the piece that I submitted for the Tomie dePaola award this year. His prompt was to: using ourselves as the character, create a scene from our youth that said something about the person that we are. He asked that the emotion of the character be immediately apparent.
Tomie stated that, in viewing the pieces that he selected as winners, he experienced an element of caring about the characters. He wanted to know more about them.
Some of them had not overly defined spaces. Some had a bit of a sketched quality. This got me wondering about the qualities or definition of a finished piece of artwork. When is an artwork finished?
Of course this got me wondering further about my own piece that I had submitted. Had I laid it all out there? Had I said too much in my piece? Was there no reason to keep digging to find out more about this character?
Should the ‘finished’ factor be a consideration for an illustration piece, or is it meant to make a statement?
Perhaps as Forest Gump suggests, “Maybe it’s a little bit of both.”
Maybe both should be happening at the same time in a piece of art.