About The Artist
Bio
My Name is Mariel Allen and I am a digital artist, traditional artist and everything in between. I have a background in both fine arts and digital arts which allows me to combine artistic skill with technical execution to create unique, engaging work. I am very receptive to different and new ways of creating, always looking to experiment and broaden my skill set. Due to my wide range of skills, I can easily adapt to different ways of being creative.
Artist Statment
The world is dark and overburdened. My work is a visual representation of the shadows and what hides within them. The things that live in the shadows are simply a representation of what lives in the deep crevices of the human mind. They consist of fears, both real and imagined. They are the nightmares that haunt us in our sleep. They are the uncontrollable voices in our heads. They influence who we are. The work I create is a reflection of the struggles of living with the darkness.
I try not to limit myself to any single medium, which allows me to generate a large body of work, consisting of drawings, sculptures, 3-D models, animations and image composites. Though very diverse in medium, every piece I make has a high level of craft, which is due to my perfectionist approach and obsessiveness over small details. It varies from drawing millions of tiny dots to form a single image, to sculpting twelve separate fingers out of clay for a single piece. I prefer to render my work by hand. Working by hand becomes more personal and more human. My visual style is a combination of realism and sculpture, treating every piece as its own realistic, three-dimensional entity.
With my work, I attempt to explore the contrast between appeal and terror while illustrating the balance between the mundane and the supernatural. While unpleasant in concept, I strive to make every piece visually alluring. There needs to be some beauty in the ugly world we live in.
