Today was a weird day, painting wise. This was the first time in an extremely long time that I felt the fear that everyone talks about when they paint.
Last Thursday my Spanish teacher asked me to make a little poster to put up in the library with the poems that were submitted and preformed in the Annual Hofstra Spanish Poetry Contest. When I said I thought it was no big deal. When I started it today I started to get into some pretty big problems that I'd never encountered before. All the sign has to say is "2014 Annual Hofstra Spanish Poetry Contest". I thought that I'd paint it, because I like paint better and I have more colors to use. I realized soon after I started that this wasn't some other painting thing. I couldn't just dive in empty-minded like I'd been doing with the "Julian-Slug" piece for the past few days, because if it didn't come out right the first time there was no going back. The first problem I encountered was that I had no idea where to put the words. The title was pretty long and if it wasn't spaced right then it'd look weird. I thought a lot about how I'd wanna put it, and even now I seriously regret my choices. The biggest problem was that I there were some words that had to be on the same line or else it'd read weird. "Spanish Poetry Contest" had to go on the same line, because you read it as one thing. I ended up putting annual and Hofstra together and 2014 alone at the top. I painted it after. I divided the canvas paper up all nicely, spaced out the words and used colors that were very spanish. I soon realized, while painting in the letters, that I didn't have a brush that was small enough to do the letter the way I wanted to. I went in, very carefully, painting in the letters. After, I decided to make two little drawing on the empty corners of the page. I know with something like this, detail can be the enemy. If it's too complicated, it doesn't look nice. I made a book and a pen. I was terrified going into this. Terrified as in I had serious anxiety. My heart was pounding out of my chest as I started and it was something I'd never felt before. I drew out the book five times on a little sheet of paper before going on the piece, and I even tried to see if I could paint the book on another paper and press it onto the piece (but it looked terrible when I tried). The pen became a huge thing because when I stared it didn't look anything like a pen.
I think the poster turned out fine, I'm not really that proud, especially since I could have done the same thing in 10 minutes on my computer, but it's done and I can say that I stood up to artist fear. I never want to feel this again, but I know that it's probably something I'll encounter more as I keep painting. What really gave me the fear was that it's something so new to me, I've never painted for anything like this, and the consequences for it failing are more than just a day in my 365 that could get forgotten after a week or two, a failure in this is something that I have to look at every day I'm in the library, it's something that people are going to look at, it's disappointing people who had faith in me. I didn't think that I end up blogging today, but since this quarter we're blogging about process I thought it'd be a good opportunity to write what I was feeling and this change in my process.