Kelsea Petersen

Feature by Alison Hog

Photos by Sungyoon Lim

Kelsea (she/her) is a junior at Columbia College studying Visual Arts. Through different mediums—oil painting, drawing, intaglio printmaking, illustration—she lets her creativity run free. Though each serves a different purpose, Kelsea loves depicting people she loves and experiences she treasures across mediums. Kelsea speaks softly and smiles brightly, and this love is evident all around her.

I met Kelsea on a rainy Tuesday evening in the lobby of Dodge Hall. As she approached me with a contagious smile, the kind that could easily make anyone forget the somber weather outside, I instantly noticed her clothes were stained with different colors of paint. Home to the School of the Arts, Kelsea suggested meeting in Dodge as she would be there working on a project for her Figure Painting class. I inevitably pictured Kelsea in one of the studios, combining different shades of red, green, and all the brightest colors to bring her latest visions to life. Paint on her oversized gray hoodie, ripped light blue jeans, and white Dr. Marten platform Chelsea boots were only a small price to pay for such creative endeavors.

Kelsea started her artistic journey early in high school when she got into a program after encouragement from a middle school teacher. Serving as her first real introduction to painting, she was soon welcomed into this world of creatives and ever since, has pursued opportunities that have allowed her to fully immerse herself in her art. 

There are three mediums that Kelsea centers on: oil painting, intaglio printmaking, and illustration. Oil painting, she admits, is both her first and favorite form of expression. Kelsea takes pleasure in the creation of portraits inspired by the impact of pop culture, particularly boy bands like One Direction, on teenage girls’ experiences with gender and coming-of-age. Her latest portraiture series beautifully portrays this, depicting her female friends in different spaces and bringing to light their femininity and individuality. The framing of this series was inspired by Harry Styles’s songs that got her through a hard breakup at the beginning of college and, through the inclusion of details and symbols, she hopes to translate the feelings evoked by each of the songs into the essence of the paintings.

For her, these pieces are deeply fascinating and personal. As someone who, just like her, was a teenage girl not so long ago and often finds art to be distant from her experiences in this tumultuous, yet transformative period, I found myself admiring Kelsea’s efforts. Pop culture, and especially pop music in the form of boybands, is a type of media whose power is too easily dismissed as not worth it or even as not sophisticated enough to be explored. Instead, Kelsea is keen to recognize this undermined type of music has dictated a lot of her stages growing up, and so, “it’s a very guiding force in [her] art and also in life,” having the opportunity to immortalize its power in her work.

Between laughs, Kelsea shares how she was initially drawn to capturing the influence of this subculture on teenagers’ lives—their friendships, relationships, exploration of their sexuality—through a project she did on gender performance in One Direction for her University Writing class. Fascinated with what she found, she saw how boybands “is an underrepresented genre in a lot of fine arts, and thought it was interesting to combine both.”

Her portraits are magnetic—while incredibly realistic, they have this dreamlike element to them. “A lot of what I do is what I’ve been calling a Frankenstein method of creating reference images,” Kelsea explains to me when I tell her so. She collages the photographs of her friends with other images to create the final painting and uses layering and wash techniques to emphasize the ever-present details. In terms of color, Kelsea is mostly drawn to the use of pinks, greens, and reds for their vibrancy—which undeniably shines through in her work—arguing how these colors are “sort of looked down upon when it comes to more serious painting,” so she likes having their dramatic effect on her oil paintings to also further highlight her exploration of undermined elements in art. 

Another medium Kelsea has been experimenting with is printmaking, going in this case for a more intricate composition. “I like the very drawn, hyper-detailed sketch look to it,” Kelsea tells me with a warm smile as we look at one of her pieces. In this case, the theme of teenage girls and pop musical culture is less present, leaning more towards inspiration from classical storybooks and magical realism. The storybook frame allows her to exploit that detail-oriented element she enjoys and that, while present throughout her art, especially shines through here with the inclusion of objects that highlight the center figure. 

Still, even in printmaking with its different techniques and overarching themes, she likes using her female friends as inspiration. The piece we’re looking at, for example, has her two childhood best friends as its core in a situation that though normal—doing each other’s make-up—has this magical dimension to it because of its storybook framing and use of only black, white, and yellow.

“They’re such beautiful people inside and out, and I love getting to represent them,” Kelsea shares with me, and her whole face brightens up, warmth quickly reaching her blue eyes. For her, there are memories attached to these works, particularly from the photoshoots used as inspiration, and she believes that in every single class she's taken so far, her friends have been her muses in one way or another. “To my knowledge, all of them so far have liked my drawings of them,” she laughs. “Hopefully.” And I wondered, how could they not? After all,  all of them were so gracefully and generously rendered.

Despite Kelsea’s preference for oil painting and fascination with printmaking, both of which she does for the “sake of art” and have allowed her to “get more personal which [she] love[s],” I soon learned she hopes to pursue a career in digital illustrations. Considering Kelsea’s artistic mastery, it should come as no surprise, then, that she is currently the Illustrations Editor at the Columbia Daily Spectator and the Photo & Art intern for NBC News and TODAY.com. 

I was quite skeptical at first. In my eyes, illustrations for hard news journalism meant renouncing, at least to one extent, one’s creative freedom. Kelsea soon calmed my doubts, “I don’t think you have less artistic freedom because even though the idea that the article comes first, it is the way that you interpret it, your own personal spin on it.” And, by also having to juggle fast deadlines, she has grown more confident in her artistic decisions in the way. “I’m able to be a lot more decisive in my artistic choices in a way I wasn’t before,” she explains. 

All around, what stood out to me is that there is no doubt Kelsea finds delight in the work she does. She likes “really bright colors” which add an alluring vibrancy to her pieces; intricacy and the “joy in painting aggressively;” and capturing tiny moments of life, her own and her friends’. “It’s just fun.”

Moving forward, Kelsea is hoping to improve her techniques across all mediums, hoping to try combining all forms in a dynamic process that brings her art to new heights. She’s thrilled to start working on her senior thesis next year which will expand on her already existing work on “teenage fandom when it comes to music.” Kelsea is also working on shifting to “art to tell a story as opposed to painting a moment in time,” striving to be more conscious about her narrative choices in her following series. 

Through her pieces, Kelsea playfully explores and makes sense of the world around her, a world I want to see through her own eyes—with love, detailed attention, and in all the brightest colors. 

Visit Kelsea’s website to view more of her work.

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