2004 - Oil on Canvas [Reproduction] Marc Chagall's "I and the Village"
Art Log #04.01: A 6-foot collaborative oil reproduction of Marc Chagall’s I and the Village, exploring identity, place, and the bond between self and community.
Art Log #04.01
Title: I and the Village (after Marc Chagall)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Scale: 6 feet (reproduction)
Year: 2004
Context: Collaborative Art IV senior art project
Description:
A large-scale oil reproduction of Marc Chagall’s I and the Village, created collaboratively with fellow Art IV students as a culminating senior art project. The work faithfully interprets Chagall’s original composition while emphasizing scale, texture, and shared labor.
Why This Piece Matters:
This painting represents my earliest understanding of art as relational—that identity does not exist in isolation, but in constant dialogue with place, community, and tradition.
Chagall’s central idea—the mutual dependency between self and village—mirrors my own lived reality. I grew up, and still live, on my family’s 100-year-old farm, where individual purpose is inseparable from collective history. This work marks the first time I consciously explored that truth through art.
It is also my first experience of collaborative creation, reinforcing a theme that continues throughout my life: meaningful work is often built together, culminating in hanging the extra-large reproduction in the high school’s main corridor for students to contemplate.
Themes Introduced (that recur in later work):
Individual identity vs. collective belonging
Place as inheritance
Community as sustenance
Art as shared labor
Memory embedded in land
Series Note
This piece is part of an ongoing log of my artwork, spanning years and mediums. I’m collecting it all in one place to better understand the throughline of what I make and why I make it. At its core, this work is about creating art that lands in the body before it lands in the head—work meant to evoke a visceral feeling and linger. Each entry is one step in that larger conversation.
View the full archive —> here.