Reflections:
Week One:
This is the first art we all did together andI’m very happy with how mine turned out. We all
followed the same prompt, which was basically that we were going to listen to a specific playlist and then try to capture what we felt was the mood. It was interesting to see how the same music could be interpreted differently by different people. The playlist we chose was one of instrumental music, largely scores from movies or post-modern rock. The songs reminded me strongly of space, particularly of feeling small—microscopic in the scale of the universe, yet still largely important because my own role in it is the only one I could ever hope to understand. The entity on the righthand page is representative of myself, with the red mass of color looking almost like hair. I wanted to have the figure representative of the individual be looking into the depth of space with the area directly surrounding the face less like space. Instead of being immersed in it, the figure is more accurately gazing into the cosmos from just beyond it. There is a juxtaposition in the red mass of hair and the red shape on the lefthand side of the page, and in the tear on the right side of the face there is a galaxy-like expansion.
I really enjoyed this entire piece. I worked with watercolors, which are one of my favorite mediums. I also really liked the fact that we all listened to the same music to such different ends. When I think of space I think of magnitude, but I also tend to think of unrealistic aspects, like shining colors and twinkling lights, and even the little green men. I was a space kid. I had a set of informational cards when I was younger with cool pictures and names and descriptions—things like novae, and nebulae—and it sparked my love for this strange and beautiful place that I could never truly experience. To this day I love making jokes about the aliens coming to visit us, or about drifting out into space and finding the secrets to the universe like in the movies. This is the overarching mood I really wanted to capture with my art, something slightly more emotive and wondrous than realistic, and I’m glad it turned out so well.
Week Two:
I did this piece based on a still-life arrangement of random objects that were set up in a class one night. I found the focus on perspective to be kind of challenging because I’m not used to drawing from life. Every time I had to readjust my position, I felt like I had lost my view and was starting again from a different angle. It was making it hard for me to keep track of a single perspective without actually drawing in the horizon lines. Because I was feeling uneasy about it, I used a messier style with my lines and my ink as a sort of cushion. I can recognize now that the perspective on my table is slightly messed up, but it was definitely a learning experience and I suppose that’s the entire goal anyway. I like the style of the drawing and I feel like the controlled chaos lends the scene a bit of character that a perfect replica would not have. I gained a lot from this piece despite not being the happiest with it. I would like to work more on this kind of combination in the future to improve on it. I’m a fan of realistic scenes with careless lines and imperfections, and I especially like the visible combination of graphite and ink.
Week Three:
This is the second piece I workedon for the experience and I’m not as happy with it as I was with my previous one, but I still think it’s a solid piece and I got to mess with a style that I never had before. The prompt for this one was to pick three words we felt described ourselves and then come up with a symbol and a color for each word. It’s an exercise I pulled from an art therapy course I took, and I thought it would be an interesting exercise to pose to my friends to prompt some mid-art self-reflection. The words I picked for myself were expressive, resilient, and credulous. The eye is the symbol for expressive, and I chose that because I feel that my feelings and my reactions are always pretty clear in my face. I’ve always sort of felt like my eyes did a lot of my talking for me, especially in moments when I’m particularly excited about something or really down about something else. I tend to feel emotions in extremes, and I often feel that I don’t have the right words for certain experiences. I get a soaring feeling sometimes at concerts when the band plays a favorite song of mine. A lot of times when I’m frustrated, I start to feel like there’s a pit in my stomach that will never stop expanding. There are extreme emotions like these that I just feel are expressed well by an eye, particularly a blue one because blue has such a wide scale of hues that can be associated with such different things. I picked the flower (a clematis) for resilient, because I view resilience in a way that isn’t entirely typical. It’s often viewed as a synonym for strength, and almost didn’t use it for that reason, because I see myself as rather weak. I used to think of resilience and think about people who can handle life’s punches without cracking or crying or breaking. It’s taken me a long time to realize that my being knocked down by hardships in my life doesn’t make me weak and that I’m resilient in how I get back up every time. Perennial flowers go through cycles, and they have to die for the winter so they can regrow in the spring. They continue to do this, and it’s something that I identify with. I have to shut down to get through the worst of my depressive episodes sometimes, but I’m always waiting it out for brighter times to come around again. I used purple simply because my mom grows purple clematises in the front garden and they’re one of my favorites. The purple makes the symbol feel more personal. The final object, the crystal, is representative of being credulous. There are lots of meanings behind lots of stones and crystals, and lots of things like astrology and extraterrestrial life that I try to believe in just for the sake of believing in something fun and fantastical. I don’t really need proof of any of these to believe in them, it’s just something I enjoy, and I shouldn’t need any reason other than that. I like being able to indulge in conspiracy theories and strange beliefs because at the end of the day it’s a sense of faith just like many people have in various ideals (but, for the record, I don’t believe in any conspiracies to the point of denial of logic, just to clear that up). I also believe that being open to hearing anything helps keep me a more openminded person in all aspects of life. I picked orange because I viewed this crystal as citrine, my birthstone, and again I just liked having that personal element.
In terms of the making of the art, I faced some challenges. I tried to use some alcohol-based markers that lots of real artists use and it’s clear I need some more practice. I also wanted to do a design that was smaller but more focused on the small details, and I struggled because drawing in great detail isn’t a strong suit of mine. Both aspects I struggled with are things I would like to continue messing with though.
Final Thoughts:
This experience has been many things to me. It’s been a chance to work with my friends on a subject in which none of us are experts. It’s been an opportunity to give back to the sense of community in places around Clifton like The 86 that are a huge part of the campus life for many people. It’s been a challenge that has given me practice in finding balance and managing time. All in all, I’ve had a good--albeit stressful--time working on this project. I really appreciated the practice I got with various types of media at the start, and in the final product I most enjoyed finding materials, colors, and themes that fit well together. I really like art that has a lot of meaning and symbolism and we got to incorporate lots of that in what we did. We worked with Monica and Chris, owners of The 86, to see what their establishment really meant to them and what they strive to embody in it. We added touches like the countries they get their coffee from and maps that include all the colleges in the area. The entire piece is like a scavenger hunt and I love that about it.
I also feel as though this experience has taught me a lot. Group work is a whole different ball game when you’re working in a group full of friends that you’ve actually chosen as opposed to an assigned group of strangers in a class. I know a lot of my friends’ strengths and weaknesses and I know that art is something we all had our reservations about. It was really interesting and rewarding to see the very unique and individual ways that each person was able to contribute to the project. For example, I really liked picking the materials for the background and the various three dimensional elements, as well as working with the paint, but I would have been really lost if it were up to me to determine how to attach the heavy pieces, or how to actually hang the canvases. Everybody had a way to contribute that added to the overall success of the experience and I’m very glad I got to see the people around me shine in areas they were already comfortable in and grow in areas they were not. Another element of working with friends meant running into a lot of trouble trying to coordinate schedules so we could all work on it at the same time. We hesitated to have anyone doing any part of it alone in their individual free time because we wanted to make sure every decision was one upon which we agreed, but this caused us to fall a little bit behind, and with exams and everything else we realized we all had a little too much on our plate. I’m still extremely proud of the work we did, but I wish we had managed our time a little bit better and that is something I will keep under consideration in any similar projects in the future.
Another growing experience I’ve gotten out of this whole thing is the ability to let myself feel more comfortable with personal failures or shortcomings. Very frequently when I think about something I want to draw or create I stop before I’ve even started because I’m afraid it won’t turn out how I want or that I won’t have the time to really dedicate to it which means it’s not even worth starting, or even that I can’t stray out of the comfort zone of the subject matter
and materials I’m already comfortable with. I’m accustomed to exhibiting a lot of self-defeating behavior, but with this honors experience there really wasn’t the ability to back out. I had other people, as well as the honors guidelines, holding me accountable and it did a lot to push me past some of my anxiety. I learned how to be okay with a product that wasn’t exactly how I envisioned it, and I figured out how to focus more on the parts that I did like than the parts I didn’t. This was very beneficial in the final product as well because we are obviously not professional artists and I was afraid that once our piece was installed, I would only be able to see the things in it that I didn’t like. I ended up really loving how it looked though. Despite not being a professional work of art, you can see the heart and soul we put into it and I think that speaks more than anything else.
