Hello Everyone! My name is Saadiq Alli – I am a teaching artist living in (on) Long Island. Below is a little bit about my art practice and thesis topic.
Most of my work is a mixture of drawing from life, and drawing from imagination. What I see and draw from life heavily enforces my imaginative drawing, especially when it comes to my character design work. Ever since I was a kid I loved drawing characters from TV shows and movies. I used those existing characters as a backbone to create my own characters. I now continue to create my own characters and continue to develop new skills to push the boundaries of my character design practice.
Recently I’ve been using character design as a way to express my emotions and feelings. Whether I’m feeling happy, scared, or anxious I will use those feelings as an opportunity to create a character. For example: If I’m experiencing a feeling of anxiousness I’ll pick up my iPad and start drawing what that looks like. The characters never look like me, they’re not supposed to. I’m really trying to represent the feeling I’m experiencing and create an illustration that tells a story.
My research heavily focuses on students planning to pursue art careers after high school and the comments they face when they express interest in those careers. During my K-12 education I knew I wanted to pursue a career in the arts and was bouncing between 3-4 choices during that time. I eventually decided to study architecture since it was considered ‘less risky’ and ‘more stable.’ In 2020 I decided to leave architecture and pursue a career in art education, which was one of the career choices I was thinking about back in high school. Throughout this time I kept wondering how many individuals gave up their artistic career choice to pursue something more “stable.”
This eventually became the spark for my research project. But instead of looking at adults or college students who changed their career choices for something more traditional, I decided to shift my focus to students who are still in the process of deciding. I decided to look at the problem before it was too late, before students went down the more traditional path and regretted their decisions. My research focuses on high school students that are thinking of pursuing a career in the arts. I’ll be looking at the types of comments they face, who those comments are coming from, the underlying reason for these comments, and how it impacts a students’ decision.
Hopefully, by having a better understanding of this phenomenon, parents, teachers and counselors will be able to better prepare and reassure students planning to pursue a career in the arts.
Links:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/opinion/culture/parents-expectations-writing-art.html
