Michele Bukoske (Mishka)

	As a second semester junior in high school, my art teacher, Charles Schanou, influenced and encouraged me to persue a career in art. Over the past several years at Hastings College, I have directed my studies towards drawing with a commercial art and graphic design style. I have strongly been influenced by four people: Henri de Toulouse LaTrec, my sister, Andrea Bukoske, who directed my attention to Patrick Nagel, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Both Toulouse LaTrec and Patrick Nagel have combined graphic design in a poster style, using simple lines and forms to create human images and elements in their stylistic art form. Georgia O'Keeffe has caused me to see that everyday situations and my surroundings have a great affect on me and my art work. With the way that she took a simple flower and created a new world for the viewer to see; in a different perspective and light. I have emulated all of their styles and have incorporated them into my own art style.
The three medias I feel that would express their's, as well as my own feelings and expressions, lines, elements, forms, and shapes are: lithography, papermaking, and painting. Lithography, derived from the Greek word meaning, "Stone Writing." It's our earliest form of graphic design and printmaking. Papermaking has recently become popular in the southern part of the United States: Arizona, California, and New Mexico. It's been around for several years, but a reserge of its art form has been revived. Althought papermaking can be used as art itself, I have tried to incorporate the paper, without using artfacts and other handy gimics, but have used the paper to inhance the lithography prints by adding the paper to them; creating similar forms and shapes as Nagel did behind his models. And finally, with the use of painting, I have taken the design elements, and created the images, with my prints, and placed the images upon canvas, allowing them to flow and float into the viewers mind.
	In the end, I have tried to recapture the human body as Toulouse LaTrec and Patrick Nagel did in a poster style, as well as Georgia O'Keeffe's style of expanding the truth. But I have intended to allow the viewer to see the influence that the great masters have had upon me. And when they view my artwork and style, I want them to see an original 'Mishka', and not an O'Keeffe, Nagel, or Toulouse LaTrec. I have intended for the viewer to stop and take note at what my images are representing; to be drawn into the moment and to see the world in a different perspective. I want them to wonder just exactly what they are seeing before them. I feel that each person seeing the artwork, should be involved with it and somehow feel that they have received some reward from seeing it.
"Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which would otherwise have remained unknown to us thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists." -Marcel Proust