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.