Seonju Townsend

About the Artist

Seonju Townsend is a Korean-American artist, lives and creates fine art in Baltimore, Maryland. She earned BFA at Towson University, where she studied painting, drawing and printmaking. She is refining her skills on the use of oil, oil pastels, graphite and printmaking. She has focused her work in portraits and landscape. Currently, She is working on her MFA at Towson University. Seonju is interested in capturing the ordinary lives of people, to show just how extraordinary those "ordinary" moments are when viewed externally.  She has learned a lot from differing sources of experience.  Most notably her time in England and the United States, where she used the settings and lifestyles of the local population to find the internal truth, the inside face, of the objects and people that inspired her.

Artist's Statement

Life is complicated and viewed differently depending on perspective. I want to express my own interpretations of the image of people and their life. Also I want to express the emotions from my memories and experiences in my work. I must draw upon both my pain and happiness to express feeling that viewers can both see and relate. If I am successful, then viewers will see my work and feel from their own experiences the emotions that I used to create it. My work is representative of things from the daily lives of my family and friends. I continue to paint places where I spend my time or from how my memories of events make me feel. I use my photography, as a frame of reference, to remind me of places and things I have seen, as my memories continue to be the inspiration I use for my paintings. I create worlds of emotion through my use of shapes, colors and brush strokes to ultimately invoke sentiment from the viewers.