Sunday, May 3, 2009

Emergence

Last week, the last set of paintings in my Painting 2 class were due. For the project, the class had to build an imaginary landscape and make 4 paintings based on it. At first, I was not at all sure about this project and had no idea what to do. Eventually, I got an idea one night and constructed my diorama of sorts from mat board triangles and yarn.
Last week, as I had only the week to finish them, I had to put several hours in to get the paintings done. Consequently, this resulted in few hours of sleep and a bit of mental and physical strain as I was also winding down for all of my other classes and working at my job as well. So anyway, night after night, I went to the studio right after work to join the rest of my class in our race against time. Though I never really wanted to go and work on these paintings hour after hour, there was something invigorating and stimulating about it. I was learning to paint quickly and to see beyond the surface. Multiple colors resided in one color and shadows came to life and took on a vibrancy I greatly desired to captivate and translate accurately but not necessarily realistically. I grew tired and sometimes had to stop prematurely but tried to apply equal investment to every portion of each painting so that it was at least balanced in its shortcomings.
I finally finished. I set the paintings alongside one another for a final personal analyzation before the in-class critique. As I viewed the works all splayed out together, I noticed a bit of an emergence in my paintings, an evolving per say, in which I was finding my way to understanding the subject and the matter. Albeit, one can never be done learning as long as one seeks to do so, but I found that somewhere in the midst of all that seeing and painting, rushing and not thinking, it started to make sense. There was a beauty in it all that I never would have seen perhaps, had I not worked and reworked the same setup from different angles. I was learning to look and find while actively doing. Even though my works are no masterpieces by any stretch of the imagination they contained something much more wonderful than a prestigious title or appraisal. They contained me.

1 comment:

  1. Beautifully written--so glad to hear some of the connections you are making while you work!

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