Born and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts, Aria Hatfield started drawing people at the age of seven. She loved watching Saturday morning cartoons and anime shows as a child. Fascinated by the characters and their stories, she began creating her own characters. These characters became visual representations of her identity. Within each of them, there were bits and pieces of her past, present and what she aspired to be. As her love of characters grew, her skill for creating them became more refined.
Encouraged by her elementary art teacher Mr. Breen, Hatfield discovered, her talent with shading while using pastels to create a close up of a flower. From shading with smudging and blending to lines to just dots, her eye for detail and hand-eye coordination improved.
Continuing her education up through college, Hatfield studied the works of da Vinci and Durer. She created master studies and continued to build her repertory of techniques. The content of art pieces also continued to be important as well. She looked at Norman Rockwell’s creation of stories within pieces of his art as well as story and character development contained in movies in her film classes and in fiction writings in her creative writing classes. These influences helped her to create characters within her art that were more than what they seem at first glance.
Her current style started in a lecture class at MCLA. She began to doodle in her notebooks and noticed that the lines and shapes formed created symbols. She began to incorporate this style into her art pieces. The designs created defined her characters and let her viewers into their worlds.
Hatfield will receive a Bachelors of Arts from Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in 2015 for Art with minors in Business and Arts Management. Hatfield has stayed active in creating and teaching the visual arts by being cofounder and secretary of the Artists Association at her campus. While also getting to know the art management side of the visual arts in an independent study class, Hatfield participated in the installment of “Inside the Outside: Reconsidering Our Views About Art”, in Gallery 51 in North Adams by aiding in the installment of art pieces, writing some of the wall texts and setting up two Evening Discussions called “Art and Biography” and “Art Education and the Education of the Artist”. She will be exhibiting her art in the same gallery in her upcoming Senior Art Show on April 21, 2014.
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