Saturday, April 2, 2011

THE IMPERMANENCE OF EVERYTHING

I started in a few new directions this semester and only a few have endured until now, not because I didn't want to continue them but because I did feel a little bit of pressure at having my thesis show come graduation time and I didn't want a kind of ramshackled together sampling of "things I tried this semester" This is a detail from something that I just started not too long ago and was originally planned as my kind of coup de grace that would take a pretty central place in my show. I've decided to stop working on it and scale back, not in terms of size or ambition or anything like that, just in terms of living life too fast.


I was getting a lot of conflicting critique about all the new work I was making, that it was new and exciting and risky, but still safe, that it was somehow academic, that I should take out the figure, that I didn't need real spaces, that I work in a predictable way and yet I was taking a lot of risks and changing at a very rapid pace. I'm still not sure what exactly I was thinking when I started these new pieces, I was excited about them for sure, but I think there was also a part of me that was kind of sticking it to 'em. I went completely abstract on a huge collaged together built, woven, painted but not a painting, half 3-d, half 2-d business and I kind of hated it. What everyone asked me was if I enjoyed doing it, and I didn't even know, I mean I did because it was just painting color and pattern and it was pretty free. But I didn't like it, I didn't even like the idea of it. The point is I was probably headed in this direction on my own and I would have arrived there at the appropriate time, but I jumped the gun because I feeling all this pressure to change and change NOW. There were some weird hybrids along the way that I liked but nobody thinks are successful like this.


and now I'm turning back the clock. I'm going to focus solely on what I want my thesis show to look like and how I want to represent myself and putting myself back on track with myself. It's been a really frustrating time riding along at someone else's frequency. So these cyanotypes are what's in the works and some new charcoal drawings that I'll post soon.


I also realized that this has a striking similarity to these ceramic sketches I made and cyanotyped a while back.


I'm nervous about how little time i have left to pull together a show that I'm happy with, but first the first time in a long time, I'm feeling really great about what's happening in the studio instead of feeling really anxious about where things are going and I think that alone will get me through to the end feeling good and in the right place.

2 comments:

  1. So........does this mean you are starting from scratch after we talked?

    I like the new stuff !!

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  2. yeah that was a while ago, also I tried to call you yesterday and your phone was off like all day!

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