ABOUT Alison Tharp was born June 3rd,1979 in Stockton California. Her mother,being an art teacher started her on water colors as soon as she could hold a paintbrush. By grade school Alison's work was being shown in local musiums and other comunity art events and by highschool she was taking college level art courses outside of school. She attended the California College of the Arts when she moved the bay area in 1997. Specializing in painting and illustration, she was also self-publishing comics style zines at this time. Alison's work ranges from watercolors, silkscreens, ink drawings to short stories illustrated and typed on a typewriter. She works with poloroid transfers, xerox transfers and resin often in her mixed media creations. Her paintings have been shown from Sanfransisco to Beijing and her self-published writings,"Adventures In Food" (a comic style zine issues 1-4),"The Darling Factory" (a graphic novel), and "Hotdog Highway" (a calaborative graphic novel with artist, Jeannie Lydon) have been recognized in major art related publications around the world. Alison has also worked with musical group TrioMetric to create the animated piece "TREPAN", doing all of the artwork and the story board. This animated story has been the first of it's kind and has been shown nation wide. Alison lives in Oakland now where she paints in her studio and works as a hairdresser and haircutting teacher at Peter Thomas Hair Design in Berkeley, CA. ARTIST STATEMENT My work deals with the psychology of dreams, the unconscious, the underworld and the archetypal themes all humans experience there. In my work each character in a painting is reacting to others in an unfolding drama. There is almost always some kind of struggle or conflict. Most of the time they are not even clear to me at first. Sometimes beautiful but usually not. I use color to create tone or pervasive mood on the stage as if I could make a soundtrack with texture and light and dark. I go to what ever lenth necessary to collect the images I need for the characters. I have used drift wood, candy sprinkels, toys, plastic bugs, bike parts, and my own face and hands. I use a xerox copier to get them 2D or sometimes I just glue them right on the flat suface the way they are just to make things funny. I have enjoyed using marshmellows and candy hearts lately. I cover them with resin sometimes to make them last forever. I'm also turned on by long walks on the beach, gross American excess and Dr. Phil. I have been told that my art has an element of innocent cruelty to it. Like a child catching a bug and pulling it's wings off showing all her friends how funny it is when it tries to fly away. That is the morbid humor that flashes the crowd the entire time I'm trying to make something pretty. Truth be told though, if an idea doesn't make me laugh in either a sad or happy way I don't see the point of bringing it into my art. It's enertainment, after all.