Inside the Teenage Mind
by Ava Gonzales
“Inside the Teenage Mind” was a piece I made as a senior in high school. I wanted the piece to represent how as a teenager, we take so many turns in life, our journey is not a straight line, there are peaks and breaks in the road. I wanted the different types of paint and brush strokes/techniques to represent all the different choices a teenager makes. I started out with basic watercolors to represent the foundation of life, and added metallics to show how I can make impulsive, yet exciting choices, then I wanted the spiked brush strokes to represent the tough times I experienced through my high school experience. Lastly I added salt to the paint to give more texture to the piece.
Artist Bio:
Hello! I’m Ava Gonzales, a young Latina artist here at the University of the Incarnate Word. I’m currently a sophomore in Early Education and am expected to graduate in 2026. I have always had a passion to make abstract art with all types of materials, and share my thought process/ feelings through my art.
Interview with the Artist
Q: Where do you find inspiration from? What was your inspiration for this particular piece?
A: My inspiration for this piece was all of my high school experiences and how they shaped how I feel, think, and process.
Q: What is your creative process?
A: When creating a piece I try to think about what has affected, inspired, or made me feel some type of way and figure out how to portray that through the paint. When creating this piece I didn’t know what to do because everything at that point in time seemed too complicated and confusing. That is why I tried my best to capture what my mind felt like at that very point in my life and show it’s complexity.
Q: Is there a story your piece is trying to tell? If so, what is it?
My piece is meant to show that your mind/life doesn’t have to be perfect, there’s going to be things weighing on it making you feel down, there’s going to be issues that you face and must make hard decisions about, there’s going to be good thoughts and feelings mixed in as well, our lives are complicated and we all have a lot of different things going on in our lives that we think about daily. Now this piece can be for any point but for me this was my teenage mind.
Q: What does art mean to you?
Personally, art means that I can always create something when I don’t quite have the words to write.