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.