Consenses

pictures of my food for consenses

Incomplete

Right now everything around me feels incomplete. My artwork, my day to day life, nearly everything. 
My pieces have been feeling unfinished, and even though I try and make them feel finished I have no idea what is missing from them, that thing that will give me that satisfaction of finishing a piece. My pieces have been feeling like sketches. I have tried adding color, different sizes, different paper. Nothing has been seeming to work. Maybe it's lack of inspiration. I have the overwhelming urge to create art and draw but once I start thinking about what my mind goes blank or all my ideas are crap. I am not quite sure what is causing me to be uninspired, maybe its the weather, or simply a lack of change, or maybe the opposite. Either way I know that I just need to sit down with a pen and let my thoughts and feelings flow onto a piece of paper, weather this takes for as doodles or writing. I think it also might help if I got out of Marion for a bit, a change in scenery would be welcomed. I am starting to feel like a caged bird, and the more I feel this way the more I want to fight everything thats keeping me here and leave. I need to focus and just sit down and get my shit together (pardon my langue).

Child like freedom

FINALLY I AM MOSTLY UNSTUCK !!!!!!

My artist block apparently just needed me to take a break from the world, and to stop overthinking everything.

In this next idea I am going to combine 2 of the ideas from the beginning of the year. I am going to combine freedom and child like playfulness. A horse to me signifies freedom. A wild mustang is free to roam as they please, hair flying in the wind, with the ability to do things at their own free will. I am combining this with the "playing" I was doing with the handprints and fingers, giving it a touch of the childlike playfulness. I am going to do the horse in black.... paint or ink or something, haven't quite decided yet... But it will be a line drawing, but a loose "free" line drawing, like in a way that almost shows movement. I thought I might want to try making the lines with my hands but after some thought I realized how impractical that would be for an idea that hasn't left my sketch book, so i am going to do the finger drawings first and than if I either hate it or decide i want to go a different way, I will try the drawing with my hands. While figuring things out in my sketchbook I stumbled upon the fact that I am slightly out of practice at drawing horses. While most of my artistic life has been spent drawing horses, in fact, a horse was the first form I learned to draw,  since I came to Tabor I have entirely stopped doing this, so I have been practicing refamiliarizing myself with the form. I have also been spending my time decideing what to use for the paper or canvas, at this moment i am thinking that black paint on canvas may be the way to go, but not a stretched canvas, just a piece. I am going to make this idea a set of either 2 or 3 and one will be a vertical headshot of the horse and the other will be a horizontal full body of a horse cantering. Both horses will have rugged, worn and flowing manes, giving them the "free" untamed look I am trying to convey.

Stuck

I have been having trouble thinking of ideas lately. I think I have "artists block"; new ideas are hard to come by in my head. Maybe it is just because of so much happening around me, but it has been a decent amount of time that this has been happening, and now that I have college stuff mostly out of the way I have no idea why I can't think of new ideas. I thought I had a break through last week in anatomy, but turns out it was only a temporary release. I was learning about how we have "finger prints", well not really fingerprints, like individual ridges that are unique to each of us allover our body but mainly on our hands, and I thought it would be so cool to do a piece that showed this. Especially because I have been trying to get back into my hand print painting and footprint painting things that I started exploring last year. I have been "playing", and when I combined my playing with my anatomy idea it turned into a project that I am finding very relaxing and fun to do, but I am not quite sure where it is headed. It appears to have no relation to my "theme" and I am not entirely sure how to branch out of it. I have been experimenting with colors and paper sizes as well as shapes of the hand prints but nothing has been really sticking out to me too much. I am hoping that some feedback could be helpful and inspiring, but I am going to keep powering through in the mean time and continue playing.

Child Like Playfulness

As I am sitting writing my college essays I am thinking about how I have evolved as an artist and honestly, it is hard. Have I even evolved? I mean sure I got better with light and rendering, and I understand concepts about composition and form. Maybe my pieces got deeper but I have always drawn and painted, and now taken pictures, from my point of view. Which leads me to has my point of view changed? I mean literally yes, as I have grown, the world around me has shrunk and of course there are other things like I don't necessarily still see the shadows as monsters ( most of the time), or think that there is the potential for a fairy to fly into my room or santa to come down my chimney. But I do like to believe that I still look at the world as though it is still my playground. I like to see the things that are out there and look at them from every angle, like I am seeing them for the first time. Really study them. But recently I have been doing this more, I want to take it one step farther, I want to take the time not only to study the object but to try and see in it what a child would see. and with this blog post I am realizing that maybe I have been thing about these pieces as too broad. I have been thinking o landscapes with little cartoon ,or childlike drawings, or instillations with paint and giving you the childlike sense of playful ness with texture , freedom and movement. But maybe I should go smaller, take a lady bug for example, I should study the ladybug and get to know what it looks like from every angle and try and figure out the best light it can be in , and find the beauty in it, and than take that to the next level. The level I haven't quite figured out yet, the level of child likeness, what a child would see in that ladybug, or see that ladybug as. I think I just need to figure out what my inner child would see and take that and make THAT my artwork.

What is something that is important to you that you feel you need to tell others about?

Have you ever sat back and thought about the things that are important to you? Over the summer I was asked to think about what was important to me. After some time thinking about it, because honestly at first I had no idea, It took some thinking. But after that I ended up making a short list and a long list. On the long list are the things that I originally came up with just like a steady stream of thoughts. The short list was a few things I found most important. Here is what I came up with; Strength, Freedom, Laughter and Happiness , which do kind of go hand in hand, playfulness (or child likeness), and Friendship. These are the things that I can't live without and think are incredibly important. I have a few ideas how to incorperate them or convey them in my artwork, but unfortunately I have some theories that don't mesh well. But I feel ready to explore the childlike ness in my work. I can also combine the laughter and happiness with it.