BECK HARKIN
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Welcome to my website. As an artist I strive to continually push and change my boundaries, making my style more expanding and everchanging than one simple brand. I had an unusual childhood, unlike my peers whose schedule was filled with activities, I spent most of my childhood alone. Being the youngest sibling by 7 years, I was often left alone to my own devices. I was forced to find various ways to entertain myself, and more often than not I ended up creating. I spent hours wandering around romanticising my life; daydreaming of my ideal life that was often filled with fantasy or fame. I enjoy making up or planning a moment in my head more than I do being in the reality of the event. I would consider myself as someone who just feels more, and with that feeling there is more need to release emotion.
Vito Acconci, a disturbing yet inventive influence of mine, performance artist.
While my medium may vary, my passion for art is anchored in the high I get while experiencing an emotion to its full and most unapologetic self. I make art for my own selfish reasons. I want to create to chase the high of self expression and the connection made with or through others by experiencing the community of art. The creation of my pieces are predominantly about myself and self-centered, telling a chronological story of my mind at the time in which I craft a piece.
My first love was drawing, I have always loved the feeling of a pen in my hand, and the fluidity of the ink effortlessly on the paper. Through my collegiate career, I’ve discovered my newfound love for installation pieces and conceptual art, as well as performance art. Majority of my pen and ink drawings consist of portraits, these portraits are either characters created from my own experiences or real life people who have impacted my state of being. There is no greater feeling than hanging up a portrait, knowing that no one else in the room knows of their significance.
My digital art career, however, has excitedly just begun. I’m eager to share this journey with you via this website, and to explore all that there is to discover in this realm of pixels.
Hopefully in my work you can see the diversity in the art that I create. Some of my greatest influences come from the works of Salvador Dalí, Vito Acconcí, Claude Monet and many more modern artists.
My creative goals is being able to live a life in which I am able to adapt and be creating collaboratively and freely on my own. I aim to reject boundaries and continually create my own world around me. I want my viewers to see my work and truly experience it. I want that moment in time to stop, to connect and feel like they really ‘get it’.
1950, by King Princess, a favorite song of mine
Garden Of Quarantine, 2020. Pen on watercolor, a Final Project
When I am struggling with an issue, I am drawn to a canvas, stage or paper to release the tension in my own mind. Some of my pieces have to do with my struggle with jealousy and obsession. When these thoughts get out of control, I learn to create my own reality of these people who haunt me. Whether that person is a family member, a stranger, an ex or even a part of myself. People have a deep way of affecting me in a way to only be released via the material world. I must create for selfish reasons, I create to cope, to release, to share, to please, to reform and to control. I create for selfish reasons.
What keeps me up at night is the people who have entered my life, and these experiences tend to fall into my bundle of influences. In my art I am purley concerned with my own world, I want to relish my own experience and those who have shaped my life. Most of the subjects in my pieces are made up from my romanticized relationships and past traumas. I strive to make my personal work relatable to the viewer, in any way possible. I believe there is something deeply personal in sharing our own individual human experiences, which inevitably are all one in the same. Love, hurt, pain, loss, happiness, jealousy, are experienced by every person; just embodied differently in individual experiences.
A series of portraits, a final project on variety. 2020
Some Influential work, not mine, unknown
Becky Harkin, taken by Madison Denzel
