Comfort

My artistic career has been a journey of pushing every boundary I have. It's allowed me to explore parts of myself that I wouldn't have even thought to go, but recently I realized that there is still a huge boundary that I haven't really touched. Style. It's a weird word to me because it assumes that art is categorized into these set things when in my mind, I just draw what I like. I have used style as a crutch ever since I started drawing. My first pieces where poor copies of expressionist art, and I used the guise of that style to pardon my lack of drawing skills. Ever since I gained confidence in my abilities, I assumed that I had no crutches anymore, that my work could be whatever I wanted it to be and the fact that it all fell into this style that can easily be identified as me didn't bother me. But recently I realized that I was using the same crutch now that I did before. There are some things that I don't even touch in art. And the reason is because I fear what the outcome would be because I don't have experience with that thing.

There are three pieces that I have made in the past month that have tried to challenge this uncomfortable feeling I have towards certain things in art.

The first is a self-portrait I made. Color is something I fear because I always feel like I get it wrong. I prefer to do everything in black and white because it reduces the number of things I need to think about. I would use color to accent the pieces, but most of my work has been just charcoal on paper. I visited the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the New York Botanical Gardens and I left inspired. Frida Kahlo is one of my idols and I had started an oil painting trying to mimic her style a while ago. I hated this piece so much I didn't touch it for weeks. Kahlo's use of color is fantastic, so I tried to copy that. Now, I feel a lot more confident in color. I can use it to my advantage rather than hide from it and hope I magically get better without practice.

The next piece is this landscape I've been doing for quest. I am comfortable only when the image is close up. I would normally freak out if I had to this, but I tried hard to make it what I wanted it to be. This is one of the few pieces I have ever worked on that has no people in it. I love portraits more than anything but I don't want to not be able to do anything else. This is great practice for doing something I'm not comfortable with because I should know how to do landscapes, even if I don't like them because in a situation like quest, I'd have to. I used to not be comfortable with acrylic paint, but after a year of working in the art room, where my painting options are either that or watercolor, I got better at using it because I was using it so often. I find that the materials that I use often determines how the piece is going to look and I don't always like that. Acrylic is good because you can layer it quickly. The water I did was only possible because it dried quick. It's a different mindset for every medium you use and I have only recently become aware of that. I can't approach acrylic like oil just like I can't approach oil like charcoal.

This last piece is one I did today. I was home and I wanted to crank something out and I wasn't even considering going in the direction that I did. I was sketching out the basic design in pencil, and for some reason, instead of picking up charcoal like I would normally do, I got a fine point sharpie. It is one of the things I dread most. It's so permanent and I'm not that type of artist. I put down something and I go over it a hundred times. It's why I have grown to like acrylic paint so much. I can just keep layering it, making slight changes, and never have to worry about fucking up something because I can always go over it with white paint. But this piece was the opposite of everything I do. It's a single line that defines areas and it's very cartoony.. I love it because it shows that I am capable of making work outside of what I conventionally make. I used oil pastels to color it in and I felt like I was in elementary school again, making sure to be very exact with my coloring because if I drew outside the lines, the whole piece would be ruined.