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.