Logan Dillon // Contributor
If you’re an artist in this age, you know it’s difficult not to feel pressure from the sheer amount of people doing similar work. It’s hard to feel that your art is truly unique with the immense amount of other work there is to compare it to. Yet it’s through this self-doubt that artists thrive and create their best pieces—never fulfilled, always trying to improve.
Coralie Mayer-Traynor’s inability to be content with her own work is what defines her as an artist. Mayer-Traynor’s work draws in the viewer with a level of intricacy and detail that makes her pieces so unique. She draws from moments or memories that begin as an image in her head. Mayer-Traynor visualizes that image, and brings it into reality through her work, sculpting and perfecting it until it’s materialized as an artwork.
The IDEA student draws inspiration from the Baroque period. She is particularly influenced by Caravaggio, an Italian painter known for combining a physical and emotional view of the human state, along with his dramatic use of lighting. Caravaggio’s form is embodied throughout much of Mayer-Traynor’s work.
For Mayer-Traynor, art is a way of communicating her feelings; it allows her to express herself without words. When asked of her defining stylistic elements, she found it difficult to answer.
“I know that every person who does any form of artistic expression has their own unique mark; like the way that artists paint lines, there’s always going to be a difference,” she explained. “But I don’t feel like it has too much soul yet—if that doesn’t sound too grim.” This self-effacing comment makes her chuckle. Her words, it seems, are a reflection of her art practice: never satisfied, revising, tweaking and reworking each piece until it’s the best it can possibly be. “Everything I do has to be perfect.”
Follow Coralie Mayer-Traynor on Instagram @cmaiyr