Isabel Cepeda
Gentle Music Subsides | Oil painting 2021
My paintings explore concepts involving perception of one’s surroundings and the communication between separate beings. The idea that our visual perception is likely a faulty image of what is actually “there” is super interesting to me. It’s also weird that between humans and between species, visual perception varies due to differences in biological make-up and simply put, differences in minds. Some species can see colors that humans can’t due to different physiological makeups of their retinas and brains. Those with certain psychiatric or cognitive disorders can see or feel things that others can’t experience. Different environmental stresses also mess with visual perception, for example, alcohol, drugs, and lack of sleep. While I’m mostly interested in these shortcomings and differences in visual perception, there are also shortcomings and variations in smell, taste, and touch.
The goal of my work is to explore this faulty perception system by depicting multiple realms that represent different visual perceptions interacting in some way. I usually like to incorporate objects that exist in our world but depicted in brighter colors and unusual scalings. I also like to include cartoon-like images from animated shows that have stuck with me on a personal level.
I think of my paintings as an exploration of how strange it is as human beings to explore surroundings we don’t fully understand. The purpose of this is not necessarily to depict what I think the world actually looks like, but to play on the fact that we don’t fully know. I also want to start communication between people of differing perceptions, almost how people have different perceptions of images in inkblot tests or cloud shapes. My hope is that people can collectively interpret my paintings to come up with a closer and maybe “truer image” (although I don’t exactly know what that means). I also hope that painting this way will help me gain a better understanding of my own perception and become more accepting of its strange and faulty nature.
Isabel is a student at the College of Medicine
