Inspired by the fantastical creatures and whimsy aesthetic of “Alice in Wonderland,” Visual Arts Concentration student Senching Hsia ’21 draws the audience down the rabbit hole with her recently completed scratchboard series. Solely composed of white lines with varying length and thickness, these three pieces — Emergence, Floral Fantasia, and Palatial Coral — depict Hsia’s love for the natural world.
Hsia’s use of scratchboards as the medium for this collection was a spontaneous decision after a chance encounter with the material in the Paul Mellon Arts Center studio. While cleaning up old drawers, she discovered the boards and experimented on them for practice. After noticing that scratching on scratchboards is unexpectedly similar to drawing on regular paper — albeit requiring much more patience and precision, as each stroke permanently scratches off the dark ink to reveal the white layer underneath — Hsia decided to embark on a new project using the medium.
The first piece Hsia created, a brood of cicadas, is an artistic embodiment of Hsia’s own personal growth — the emergence of cicadas after their seventeen years underground parallels how she has developed since infancy. When Hsia was around two years old, she was so fascinated by the cicadas in her backyard that she dissected them. Coincidentally, her hometown of Charleston, South Carolina experienced the once-in-seventeen-years cicada emergence that year. When Hsia came across an article about cicadas’ reemergence last summer, she recalled her growth since first discovering the cicadas in her backyard, as if the past seventeen years have also been a period of her own metamorphosis from childhood to adulthood.
Since Hsia enjoyed her experience working on the first piece, she ordered more scratchboards, aiming to explore the imaginary side of the plant world after her first realistic illustration of cicadas. The second piece, titled Floral Fantasia, depicts imaginary creatures fluttering around lush, exotic greenery.
“I incorporated plants that are not real, but look like they are, to illustrate a world where fantasy and nature intertwines,” Hsia said. In addition to the otherworldly flora, she chose to illustrate hawk moths — which resemble hummingbirds with butterfly tongues — in the same piece to add to the sense of supernaturality. The surrealness of this creature, Hsia noted, matches the overall landscape, embodying a lack of a definite boundary between the real and imaginary.
Her third piece is a detailed illustration of coral reefs and a school of fish. The black and white color palette of Hsia’s scratchboards poses a distinctive contrast against the vibrant color of a live coral reef. “People’s initial reaction regarding the artwork might often be astonished as they perceive the lively corals, but they would later recognize that this picture actually illustrates the skeletons of the corals,” Hsia said.
Hsia created this coral reef scratchboard with the hope that it would serve as an environmental message for people. “I hope that when people look at my work, they realize that this is something wonderful and should be celebrated. At the same time, this is depicting something that is being destroyed through climate change and sea acidification,” Hsia said.
After completing three intricate pieces with the finicky medium, Hsia has accumulated tips and tricks for aspiring scratchboard-enthusiasts. Although the irreversible nature of the material easily intimidates many artists, Hsia found that the permanence of every mark, to some extent, alleviates the overthinking and hesitance associated with drawing. Before committing to any scratches, Hsia suggested making an outline of one’s vision, such as sketching lightly on the scratchboard as a tentative contour and drawing shapes in Notability to serve as a reference.
The two underlying messages in Hsia’s artworks are to appreciate the beauty in nature, and to feel concern, worry, and hope for the health of our planet.
“I want people to be able to see the world through my eyes when they look at my art. I want them to appreciate nature and find beauty in it,” Hsia said. “Perhaps because we see nature around us all the time, it just becomes our mundane reality. But when I look at nature, I think there is still so much inspiration, so much to maintain or cultivate — especially with climate change — and so much possibility that we might lose all the beauty that there is.”
All artwork by Senching Hsia
