Letter Scramble
How does this award-winning artist use type, color, and light?
Sojung Pak, 18, Gold Medal, Painting. Images courtesy of the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers and the Scholastic Art & Writing Award Winners of 2021.
How does Sojung experiment with type?
Sojung Pak sees design as a way to communicate and plays with typography in the painting above. A freshman at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 18-year-old Sojung plans to major in art and the humanities. She hopes to someday work for an internet company as a user interface designer.
Sojung Pak
What inspired this painting?
My art teacher asked us to create sculptures with construction paper. I started playing with letter cutouts. As I moved them around and jumbled them together, it reminded me of how when I think too fast, I stutter. My words can’t keep up with my thoughts.
How did you develop the composition?
To express an overload of thoughts, I added overlapping random elements. There is no focal point. It’s a dizzying array of characters. I use many types of typography: serif and sans serif, lowercase and capital letters. And I made the letters themselves different sizes.
What was your working process?
I made individual letters using construction paper, aluminum foil, cardboard, and wire. Then I experimented with different compositions. When I found an arrangement I liked, I glued everything to a sheet of construction paper. I added a light above so the elements would cast shadows. But I wasn’t happy with the way it looked. Instead, I decided to make a painting of my sculpture. I used it as a reference to create the acrylic painting shown here.
What did you want the viewer to walk away with?
When you first see this work you think, “What is this?” But if you look carefully, things become clearer. I wanted viewers to appreciate that when people stutter, their words may not always match their racing thoughts. But the individual thoughts make sense in that person’s head.
Do you have advice for aspiring artists like yourself?
Even if you think your work is finished, it’s always good to see if you can improve it. I didn’t think my sculpture conveyed my idea, so I decided to paint it. Painting it helped me create the jumbled effect I was looking for.
Sojung Pak won a Gold Medal for her painting in the 2021 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.
To find out more about this program, visit artandwriting.org
