A Trip Down Memory Lane
Since I have been on this journey of trying to figure out the intersection of doing what brings me joy and doing what gives me a liveable, affordable life I have been reminiscing a lot about the sweet sweet year and a half I spent studying Fine Arts in Indiana. Recently a loved one said something to the affect of, “Oh have you done any art since you did that one class that one time..” and my little fragile heart sank just a little further into the bottomless pit of the hole where my self-confidence should be zinging around. To really kick it in the teeth they asked me if a piece of art I have hanging in my home was my own work. It was not, it was done by a professional artist. I pointed out that mine hung below it and was the piece I had once displayed in a local museum to which they looked at it and replied “Oh yes well that’s nice too.”
CRIES OUT IN TORTURED ARTIST MODE
They were well-intentioned, I appreciate that they remembered I had a loose connection to art at a recent-ish point in time. One thing I have found to be true of myself since living here in America is that I have become smaller and smaller than I have ever been. It hasn’t taken much to bring the part of me that I felt was kinda bright and lead me to diminish that light. I would venture a guess that many of us are feeling that way these days, the general shift away from being and towards consuming has really had a massive part to play in ruining our ability to feel internal peace and a sense of life satisfaction.
Since I have been enjoying trying to remember when I last felt at peace I will keep going with analysing the creative output I had at that time. I believe that when we look at the things we make, and why, we can see external evidence of our mental wellbeing and inner perspective in that work. Which can bolster us in our desire to keep going.
This next project from my 2D design class was about coded contradictions. Since this class I was taking was about learning the language and basic dimensions of art this was an interesting arena to think about the subtler intentions at play.
Visual art often follows unspoken or suggested social codes to give meaning that viewers can interpret without needing a verbal explanation. This means that many visual artists will use or invoke a well known ‘visual language’ to suggest what the imagery is saying without being explicit. For example, sad paintings may often use blues, muted colours and soft lines. For this project we were tasked to create an image that used intentionally contradictory elements or basic principles to subvert the normally understood agreement of meaning exchanged between artist and viewer. My idea was to do a contradiction on the idea of a ‘green thumb’ or a lifegiving gardener. I have a central character who is kind of a Disney-fied green goddess type princess character who is under the illusion that she is sowing life in the land around her. She is on a journey and in her wake is volcanic devastation and a hellscape and ahead of her is all the life and bounty of the land that is fleeing from her self-delusion and murderous black thumb.
Tools used:
Acrylic paints. Once I took painting classes and began to work with oils I never went back to acrylics but I do think they are a great at home paint option that’s safe and cheaper than oils.
Bristol paper
Artist’s tape. I use this to measure out the space I am working within and to have a clean border after being finished painting. It is the most satisfying experience to pull the paint splattered tape up and set a perfect, sharp, crisp line. OOOOH.
In terms of being a technically good piece…this is not that. There are many flaws and irritating messy bits but I enjoyed my execution (heh heh) of the concept. I find for me it reveals a joviality about my expression that lately I have felt I have lost.
The final project I undertook while still distance learning in covid times was one I was very proud of when completed and I thought would be fun to make into a children’s book concept one day. The project was all about exploring wordless narratives. In essence, we were tasked with designing our own graphic novel. It was to be three to five images and could be personal or tell a story about a wider narrative.
I wanted to address my personal experience of loneliness and bullying when I was younger, around high school age. To make it more charming and whimsical I decided to have my characters be woodland creatures. The first panel starts out completely in black and white when the squirrel is experiencing isolation. Over the course of each panel she discovers her creative self and other worlds and realms of imagination through books and her world starts to fill with colour until the story concludes with her creating her own world.
Tools used:
Bristol paper
Micron pens
Watercolour paint
Acrylic paint
I brutalized that hedgehog do NOT look too closely he…got a little weird in the face. The micron pens were unforgiving.
This image is a direct translation of a bullying tactic I experienced not infrequently where a certain kid would pull my schoolbag back as I was walking so I would stumble. To me the owl (even though I love owls) was a great representation of this person.
I used to read in the bathroom and eat my lunch during break. Bullied kids I am sure are more than familiar with this experience.
The final panel is painted in watercolour. I wanted it to feel ethereal, not solid and dreamlike. The bullies are washed out in fading grey banished to the margins.
I find it helpful to look back to things that I have made as evidence of parts of myself that feel so very far away. It reminds me of what it took to get to that place and that I can get there again. Creative acts can feel pointless in the face of a suffering world. Why bother? It doesn’t necessarily do anything or make anything money wise or solve anything or cure anything. Hobbies in general feel like…time wasted? They are not though because what they do well is connect us to our cognitive flow state, a place of peace and satisfaction within our minds and bodies that regulates our stress and anxiety and fills our pleasure bucket. The pleasure of mastering, tinkering, making and learning. This can embolden our sense of worth and value in ourselves and when we feel valuable we can spread goodwill to those around us and that is how we truly affect change.
See y’all next time when we look at some other fun creative things!
Creating in the time of the pandemic
Halfway through the 2020 pandemic around July/August time when restaurants in Indiana were starting to open their doors again I came to a decision about my future. Enough of this unstable faffing about. It was ‘now or never’ and I am so glad that my younger self decided to go back and pursue her dreams for a little bit even if I didn’t quite end up where I thought I would. Now when I feel lost in the sea of disconnection and tossed in the waves of distress and doom, I have this lovely little guiding light that helps me recollect this state of fulfillment I was in and know I can be there again one day.
When I started classes in January 2021 they were remote, over Zoom art classes. Legitimately, it was actually really fun to learn that way and to get inventive and creative about making pieces. Granted not a lot of thorough skills were being shaped and refined in those first two months of pure distance learning but I look fondly back at the pieces I made and I am transported instantly.
In front of me sits my battered, old, dark wood table that served as a desk. Littered in half-drunk cups of tea, discarded chocolate wrappers, and surrounded by plants in various stages of death and life it was a cornucopia of creative labour. Pieces of cut-up paper imbued with the power of my curses earned from teeny x-acto knicks on my skin, broken pastels being scattered around by grumpy kitty goblin paws, and a snowy dreamland to look at from within my blanket-clad cocoon of artistic flow, I would sit and dream and feel right within myself for hours. They were some of the best times. Now I have some even better-but-very-different times.
Since I am not currently making physical art I figured I would share some of my first forays into external creative production when I had oodles of time to experiment.
This was a series of three projects for my first studio class-Fundamentals Studio-2D. The first two images I composed as part of a Tonal Collage assignment. While I made these I re-watched all of Avatar the Last Airbender on Netflix and I think it’s easy to see that it influenced what I made. The second piece seems very Fire Nation vibes to me. The first piece was, I think, trying to work with Ogham runes as I was feeling some kind of homesick at the time. We had to use grey-toned paper, and create two images that were unified, had a sense of harmony, and balance with two different kinds of symmetry. This is an easy project you can do at home.
Tools used:
Coloured card stock paper
Grey toned paper
X-Acto Knife
Glue
Pencil and Ruler
If you can imagine how challenging it was to cut each individual tiny piece of black paper. The hours I tell you, to have that kind of time privilege again oh what I wouldn’t give.
This next image was for a project called Abstracted Imagery. We were to take a photograph and to render it in black and white with different lines, values, shapes and patterns. This project was really fun and challenging. The photo I used was one I took in Hawaii when we visited in March 2020. It’s of two hawaiian sea turtles laying by the water and what we did was trace the image and breaking it down to basic building block shapes and then fill in, subtract, and add patterns. I love this one because the different intensity of the blacks and line thickness and balance of positive and negative space feels very satisfying to me. The goal is to show the ‘bones’ of the image.
Tools used
Bristol Paper (this is the best paper for a project like this). In general Bristol paper is a dream for mixed media so trust me on investing in it. I like Strathmore.
A mixture of sharpies and micron pens of varying nib widths.
Tracing paper and printer to print out image to trace.
You can see the beginnings of me trying to work within a cultural experience, as it were, even this early into my art study. As the years went on this theme began to emerge in my work that felt folklorist and celebrated Irish culture and the Celtic influence. Even though it’s done with low quality acrylics (ones I had stolen from high school and still were using in spite of being literally hardened shit) and the painterly quality is crap I liked the idea a lot and it felt very meaningful to make. This project was about colour scheming, doing an abstract piece to create colour harmony. I used a tonal colour scheme. My lightest colours range from white to a pale yellow-green and my intense colours include warm reds and oranges. I have varying hues of grey and blue-greens as well as red-browns and warm gold tones. I balanced the painting with horizontal symmetry. I do think the picture was a little too representational for an abstract piece, I was feeling some goddess vibes, but overall I was happy with this at the time.
Tools used:
Bristol paper again. Useful for so many different mediums and it’s durable and looks high quality.
Painter’s tape-used to paint straight lines. Removing this to see the sexy perfect lines is the creme de la cream of making art, soooooo satisfying.
Acrylic paints. I used shitty quality and then as I went on in art I bought better paint and moved towards oils. But any will do for starting out.
Paintbrushes.
I have left myself feeling all kinds of inspired from this post beloved readers. Thinking maybe I will crack out some drawing tools perhaps one evening coming up for the first time in two years. It is such a treat to be able to look at the work I was producing when I started art college and compare it to what I made at the end and still feel appreciative for the creative zest a behind those early days, even though it’s certainly more rough and tumble. I feel such a fondness for my own sense of excellence I had then, I hope one day to bring that back into myself. Confidence and self-belief; I chase the energy of being unencumbered by self-doubt and self-consciousness. If we only make things because we expect them to be excellent when measured with the yardstick of the world, that thing will never exist because the world is so large and ever changing and we should just make and change and keep bringing forth what is inside because we will enjoy or evolve with what unfolds.
Art, where have you gone?
Welcome to month ONE BAJILLION of my creative mental block. It’s an interesting space to be in because I have not felt much inspiration in these last few years for such pursuits as creative expression but I have been trying to reach back to that part of me. For my writing self, I have been burying myself in the labours of word wielders (ooh I love this term I just thought of) with skills I aspire to and who have honestly helped me peel myself up from the pit and move towards the light. Artistic expression after becoming a mother- the love, joy, and ideas- feel like they have simply gone. Vanished into the hole inside me that is total insecurity fused with exhaustion and honestly, grief. I want to be my fullest self and embody my creative spirit but, I don’t really know who that is anymore and every time I try to just lean into the urgings that spring up from the deep well of my being I slam right into total embarrassment, fear and intrusive thought that lead to overthinking spirals of doubt.
You know the likes, I am sure we are all overly familiar with the endless loop of “I love this thing, I am going to share my love for this thing with everyone else….oh god what have I done this thing is so stupid? I am so fucking embarrassed/ashamed. What a pathetic mess and now everyone can see me I am so crap at this thing. That’s it I am NEVER doing it again.”
I have heard it recently described as ‘millennial cringe’. I enjoy that tasty morsel of a phrase even though I don’t agree that total social mortification in the face of the opening of oneself and our vulnerable thoughts to the world is strictly reserved for/ experienced by millennials. Although, I do agree that this next generation of young’uns seem particularly adept at being totally and utterly unencumbered in presenting their innermost experiences and thoughts to the world at large. So in a sense, they are refreshingly, sweetly free. Also, previous generations are quite skilled at masking and burying what they really think and feel in the name of ‘keeping up appearances’ which means oh god I guess they are super repressed. So maybe it is just us pathetic millennials who can’t er keep it in our pants? as it were…IT being surefootedness in how we choose to be in the world or not to be.
I have been diving into reading and exposure on the idea of creating anyway and doing so in the whirlwind that is life with children. This is also a concept very applicable to life without children, as we all have our highly demanding experiences that distract or detract from our joy and I don’t want to diminish anyone’s experience. I believe the truth of my evolved self that is being drawn from this time of…to put it not so lightly…total evisceration will end up in a place of such sweet beauty and being that I can’t hardly wait to embody her.
“Art is a form of nourishment (of consciousness, the spirit) ”
These words resonate with me as I have felt myself being starved of/starving myself of the essential zeitgeist that is creative production in an external capacity. Do I know what th will look like fully? No not really. I know that I do not necessarily have the time or the means to make art the way I used to. Peel back the layers of my story to when I was years younger than I am now. I was childless, working in a fabulous restaurant till late every night with my dear friends and attending art school all day long drawing and painting to my heart’s content. It was my dream and one, in my shameful moments of regret and resentment when I find myself at the end of myself in hard moments, I wish I could step back into it with every fiber of my being. We cannot go backward, and spending life looking in the rearview mirror leads only to discontent and a lack of discernment of the way things were and are.
For now, beloveds I will leave you with a glimpse at some art I made while in the stage of my life where the creation of a visual kind was my all. Currently, I am preoccupied with the creation of a ‘making and shaping a human life’ kind. It’s a good place to be all in all especially as I try to find swift moments in my day to lean a hand back on the path of my wild life to that earlier iteration of me and inch her a little closer to merge with this new me. We will find our way there one day.
Where to? Confusion (2021)
Acrylic on paper, abstract.
This piece remains one of my favourites I did from home in January 2021 when all my painting and drawing classes were remote. Obviously, it lacks skill and understanding of colour work, especially paint mixing and just even basic painting skills. However it felt like the truth of my internal reality at the time, and that means everything.
From humble beginnings
A little throwback here to the final piece I did before throwing caution to the wind and enrolling in art college. When the pandemic began in Spring of 2020 I found I had a little extra time on my hands. Not much time, as I actually worked full time through the entire pandemic when the brewery I worked at converted to takeout and remained open with a skeleton staff. Honestly THAT whole experience changed everything about my life and while it was traumatising and led to much exhaustion, tears and hurt it did spur me to radically shift the focus of my days and I went on to have the most transformative two years after that. So thanks for using and abusing me old job I guess haha just kidding I do not hold gratitude for any toxic work spaces and wish I could fix them all. It’s only now I see how I can read some good out of the self I became as a result.
So onto the art tings. I decided to do what I have always wanted to do. Go to art college :O “Mah gawd think of the college debt you fool” (my rational self cried daily). I can’t wait to write and share about the work I produced and what I learned in those challenging and stretching classes. For now here is that sweet little piece I love so dearly. I made it for friends of mine who I worked for and who will forever hold a piece of my heart. It is a quaint little breakfast spot called L Street Kitchen and if you are ever in South Bend, Indiana check it out! Family owned, true mom and pop diner style food with a warmth and authenticity that made me happily (and sometimes grumpily) wake up at 6am working double shifts for years in rain, sun and snow to get that life-giving coffee pot a-brewing for the good people of our community. I miss it, and them, now that I no longer live there.
This piece was done in acrylics and melted crayon. There are so…so many issues with the painting now that I have the understanding of the fundamentals of image composition and colour but I do like the idea and melted crayon art is one of my fun ways of making that I always love how it turns out. I also appreciate how much I have improved, I can’t believe it.
Kingfisher at Sunset
Getting back into creating art has been a tough one for me. I am starting off with sharing my first piece for the month of June (the year starts in June right?) even though I said I would do one art thingymabob a month this site just launched so I do not feel like playing catchup :)
I am not sure how I would categorise my style of making I suppose I let my brain cook up a feeling or play around with an idea and then I just go for it. Sometimes it works out sometimes not.
This was a fun and challenging return to painting. Lots of blues and textures that were hard to convey, wetness and feathers and impermeable bird colouring which is a lot of the same colour in different shades. A LOT. Spent about a week on it and am happy with the result. I am not really sure yet what else to write as I don’t usually share art publicly so bear with me and these growing pains as I figure out snappy, engaging quips to write.
