Artist Biography and Statement

We all had to write a bio and statement for the course Professional Practice for the Visual Artist, taught by Judith Page. I feel a little out of place there, as I'm the only commercial artist in the whole class--everyone else is a painter, sculptor, printmaker, etc. It's definitely geared towards the gallery crowd, but it has been helpful. Where else would a MICA student write a budget plan?

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Bio

Alyssa Devlin was born in Reading, PA in 1988 and grew up in Sewickley, PA. Both sides of her family were involved in the arts, and she was a singer and actor from a young age. After going through several incarnations of potential writing careers—first journalism, then creative writing, and at the end of her junior year of high school, she found her talent for fine art, and chose to study at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She combined her passions for drawing and story-telling as an illustration major—particularly in sequential media—and graduates in the spring of 2010.

Statement

Humor need not be found only in my doodles—I built a comical illustrated world around the everyday occurrences of my own diary. My most personal sequential drawings revolved around a four-month excursion to Florence, Italy in the winter of 2009, but my comics extend to the fictitious as well as the factual, although it is all highly personal. My thesis project, a short-story I wrote translated into comic form, is an amalgamation of personalities, events, and experiences that I have had, and that have been entrusted to me. I am interested in realism, but that does not necessarily mean drama or solemnity. I believe that real life contains as much humor as it does seriousness, and I intend to reveal that through my illustrations.