Claire Traum
Claire Traum ’21
Snuggle
In this series, I capture personal observations of my family snuggling. As we all adjust to life “sheltered-in,” I have become more aware of the ways we self-soothe to comfort ourselves in small, overlooked moments of rest. My drawings include my sister cradling a book, my dog napping, and toes curling around each other. My choice of a series around this theme is to highlight the beauty in our natural inclination to snuggle. In doing so, I had the opportunity to draw some of the most important people in my life. I also enjoyed developing my understanding of charcoal and proportions.
In the future, I look forward to further exploring the medium of charcoal, and continuing to embrace this unique time “snuggled-in” with my family.
Claire Traum ’21
Spiked
This project explores the representations of running and jumping through the marks left after feet leave the ground. To create, I ran over pieces of thick paper in my track and field spikes several times at different speeds. The metal points of the spikes on the bottom of my shoes punctured the paper and left indentations scattered across where my feet moved. I flipped the resulting “spiked” paper over to display so that the texture of the spike marks are more observable. While this paper is simply random traces of pressure created by movement, the resulting puncture marks call to mind other forms and clusters such as stars or sand.
The watercolor pieces are experiments in using “spiked” pieces of paper as stencils. After applying a watercolor or ink wash to a piece of watercolor paper, I placed a “spiked” paper over the watercolor and allowed black ink to seep into the holes of the paper and bleed into the wash covering the watercolor paper underneath. The resulting play of the black pigment and watercolor wash creates a composition that exaggerates the size of some spike marks as the ink diffuses and concentrates on the paper. Thus, the running motion captured in these watercolors is notated by what we can see (pigment) in contrast to what we can’t see (punctures) in the sheets of white “spiked” paper.