Honestly when we started I felt totally out of my league. I have never done physical art so I was a fish out of water. The whole time I’ve felt like I needed to prove to myself that I could do this and at some points I think I really did, and other times I disappointed myself. Mainly because I know what I did wasn’t the best which is a good sign that I can improve, but it’s always been hard to enact those changes to get better.
The first thing we did was inward and outward movement. A common problem is I really don’t know how to represent abstract ideas. My head can’t think in these shapes and concepts because i’m too used to the linear or at least in some way a full story. But not knowing how to do something has never stopped me from doing it, so I did the project the best I could. Went around campus a bit and just kept replaying what Chapin said in class over and over in my head. I got some decent stuff but I knew it could be better.
The next project was one big piece that had both inward and outward. A thing Chapin kept telling us was to go bigger. So I busted out Neil Patrick Harris’ 2013 Tony opening number along with some awesome Jazz and did my best. I turned off my brain and went with what I thought was right and by the end I had something I actually liked. It felt right, and I liked looking at it. But even with that one I went less abstract than I wanted creating the progress of washing something with the continuous line. Kind of a bummer but not a huge problem.
Then we had to make paintings of different views and meanings of our work. This is where my downfall began. I got up to 9 and I was just stuck for hours. People all around me were doing these crazy things and using way different methods for their paintings, and I felt like once again my inability to think on a more conceptual level was really hurting me. I went back to my dorm and tried again with a fresh mindset the next day. I was only able to get 3 more done. On the bright side I caught up on all my podcasts and listened to a movie commentary track while I worked.
Then we worked with the dancers and it was such a cool experience that I felt bad for not being able to replicate it well (this feeling would only be amplified with the next project) but I still had a blast and enjoyed being able to do something different for a day. I felt like it was a lot easier to paint the movement in a way that worked for me because I just imagined it as taking notes on their movement. Also the lemonade and sandwiches we got were pretty dope. But that’s besides the point.
Then we had to make a work with the bamboo that represented what we saw the day before with the dancers. I was absent during class so I tried to put in extra time that just ended up being wasted on forcing everything together in a very poor way. I tried to make small pieces that were going to each be something from my sketches and I was going to frankenstein them together to make this bigger abstract work. But I fell to the same fate as Frankenstein where I found out I couldn’t play god. I created a really bad piece and by the morning it had blown itself outward as if to spite me for not liking it but still forcing it to work. Learned you just can’t force some stuff.
Overall I’ve learned a lot from all of this, mainly about work ethic and what to do when I just can’t wrap my head around something. Also no one has seen the work I put into my blog with its references to work like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Saturday Night Fever, Doctor Strangelove, Gambino, and more. I put genuine thought into what quotes fit what pictures and how the movie/T.V show fits with the work I did. But honestly, even if someone besides my mom read this stuff (Hi Alma, I love and miss you) I don’t think they'd find it as amusing as I do. (And for a good reason, they're lame)
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