Sociability

I thought that I'd write a blog post since I had some free time. I already wrote a post about my latest art project, so, I thought that rather than writing about process, I'd write about my life like I used to do.

I sometimes forget to reflect on my life. Personal reflection is one of the most important things to do. Most people don't really know who they are. They live life getting to know others, loving other people, but our selves sometimes get lost. Even looking in the mirror, sometimes you forget what you look like, and you know the person that exists in your mind. As an example, in my mind, I'm loud, but when I look at how I act, I'm exactly the opposite. When people catch me off guard and talk to me, I respond so softly that even I can't hear myself. It's this unconscious response, and it's one of those things that takes more than trying to consciously change it, it'll require a total change of personality on the subconsciously level. I recently watched a TED Talk on body language, and how it can change who you are. With all the acting lessons I've received in STAC, I was well aware of how it can change the way that people view you, and ever since I've been way more aware of how I move, but this TED Talk was something even more insightful. The main idea was "Fake it until you become it". If you're a more shy person, like myself, you can fake not being that person until eventually, the fake you becomes the real you. The speaker explained this through body language, and how changing your body language over time can change the way you interact with people. I really like this idea. I feel like I sometimes get so caught up with the fear of interaction that there is no hope for me to be more social. I take actions to try and change that, but sometimes I worry that it isn't doing anything to me, which is the major reason why I do things. The more I think about it, I have become much more social in the past few years because of this, but I'm still not where I'd like to be. I purposely do things that I wouldn't normally want to, I go places that are out of my way just to try and be more social, I talk to people that I normally wouldn't, just so that I can learn how to interact better. It's helped, but I been able to realize a big problem that I have when it comes to being more sociable. I fear guys. I don't what it is, but I can't talk to stranger guy without becoming the person that I don't like being. I've been able to make friends randomly out of girls, literally just be being more sociable and talking to them, but I have a weird trust issue with guys. I worry that they wont accept me, and even when they do, I still feel awkward and shy, so no real reason. I don't have crushes on these guys, but I can't seem to act normally around them. My new goal for now is create more guy friends, particularly straight guy friends, just to rule out any romantic affection. I miss having guy friends, I miss being able to talk about video games, and I hate all the drama that girls have. Guys do it too, but literally everyday I hear that someone hates another person, and I hear all this shit about backstabbing and it's just so stupid. I don't want to believe that this is the price for having friends of substance, but I hope to find some friends that aren't like that in the form of males. The period is going to end soon, so I'll end this blog post now.

New Piece

Recently I've been working on this extremely large painting. One of the things I've been looking forward to is working on a larger scale I don't have the opportunity to paint on such a large canvas, and even if I did buy one for myself at home, they're wouldn't even be space for it in my room. I've been tackling a lot of the problems that I've been neglecting for a a while because of this new project. With my 365, I find that I rarely ever think out the pieces I'm making. The composition of the pieces is more me putting the image on the left rather than right in the middle. Most of what I make isn't made with the idea that other people would see it as a finished piece. This piece that I'm working on now is very different.

Taping out where I wanted the stairs and door was very useful.
This was the product after the first day. The great thing about the tape is that you can move it. It it's an inch too far left, I can just pick it up and move it, while if I started with charcoal, it'd have to worry about erasing the line that i had, make a new one, and then keep doing that until I got a composition I enjoyed.

After the second day of working I started to add detail with the charcoal. One of the biggest problems that I was facing was the amount of empty space. The wall and ceiling were completely empty, I put a light on the ceiling so that there could be less empty space. 

The next day, I added even more detail, and then sprayed it, and started painting.

The next day, I started painting the face. I really don't like monster right now. The colors of the clothes confused me a lot, so I just put random colors for them but I'm going to go back and rethink that aspect, and I want her face to be brighter. 

I worked on the face more today. I wanted it to be more vibrant. I also got the stairs to look more like wood. That took a while, but what I ended up doing was smudging it with a paper towel

The big thing today was making the wall interesting

Didn't have much time today, but I worked on the feet.

The Evolution of This Thing

I've been slowly working on my STAC art project for about a week now. It's been an interesting process, and it's the first project I've even done where I completely changed everything.

The first day I got home with the canvas board I painted this in acrylic paint

I liked it at first. The idea of me as a slug creature really interested me, and I realized that one of my artistic issues is brains, because in the last STAC art piece i made I also focused on brains. What I liked about this piece was the face. It wasn't too detailed, but I liked the expression that I first got. I very much disliked the tail of the slug. I had it facing the wrong direction and it just looked weird. I knew I'd have to eventually do it over.

The next couple days I started to work on it more. 

Even though I did like the head and face, I didn't like the direction that it was facing, and once I started to look at it a lot, I thought it'd be better if the face were bigger. So, again with acrylic paint I tried to fix the face. I also worked on the tail a bit, trying to put it in a better place, but that was still not a success. I changed the color of the brain, but hated that. I stopped working on this because I got a bit frustrated, especially because the acrylic paint kept drying and wouldn't let me paint over the face the way i wanted to.

The next day I came back to the piece made big changes.

I painted the entire head and tail white. I painted the white in acrylic, and then waited for it to dry, and painted over the head and tail in oil paint. I made the head bigger and the tail look like a tail. I was satisfied with the face and the slug body so I stopped working for that day.

I didn't touch the piece for about four days, and came back to it today in STAC art.

I put in the grass and started to put some detail to the pond that I am running away from. I still need to paint the other slugs running away, and the creature that is eating us in the pond, but it looks a lot more finished. I also worked on the slug body a bit more, adding little slug arms and making parts of the body lighter.

Not a single thing from the original painting exists in this painting. I'm happy about that, I realize that working through fear is something that I'm pretty good at, not to say that I don't feel it, but I know how to just keep going. I know that I probably have avoided putting detail to the brain because of fear, but if I've gotten this far, making a brain shouldn't be so scary.  

UPDATE 5/27

I finished it!! I don't really love it, but I don't hate it either. I fell that if i had planned it better from the start it could have come out better, but I like it enough to be done and move on. 

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.

Painting Trouble

This morning and yesterday afternoon I've been having some serious difficulties with what I've been working on. For STAC art I started this surrealist painting of me as a slug, running (slithering?) away in fear. For some reason, I also have an exposed brain. This is the first thing that I've worked on that hasn't been directly from observation. I was drawing my face and brain from a mirror and photo, but it really isn't working for me. The slug part doesn't look like a slug, I want the head to be bigger and the face to look more scared. So I've been playing around, but with acrylic paint it isn't exactly the same as with oil. Right now what I have looks like shit, I have decided to switch this thing to oil paint. I was reading some stuff online, and according to Google, it is perfectly okay to use oil paint over acrylic (but not the other way around, apparently).
This project, for me, is about creative exploration, and I think that I could do it much better if I were using oil, or at least the face for now.

My Recent Work

I went shopping about two days ago and along with a variety of new clothes, I also bought new art supplies. I honestly only planned on getting some more paper and white acrylic paint but I ended up buying a lot more. The big thing was these three little tubes of blue, red, and yellow oil paint.

I started to paint more again. About a week ago I did this still life with acrylic paint.

I didn't think anything of it when I started, but as I started to get into the candle holder thing I realized that I knew more about painting then I had before. I saw myself doing shading in places that I'd never do before when I painted more, and even color was pretty easy to use, which was the biggest surprise because even with my oil paint I didn't have any color. I think that this piece is far from perfect, but it had been twenty three days exactly since the last time I picked up a paint brush and for that time I consider this a huge success.

Two days after this piece was made, I painted a self portrait. 

I wanted to get more used to using a mirror rather than a picture because I want to be able to draw people in real life rather than from a picture. I don't like this one too much, and it was also made with acrylic paint, but I'm showing it because it is part of four self portraits from a mirror that I want to talk about. His skin is that color because when I opened my blinds for some more light, I looked like this weird purple. 

I already said that I didn't like the previous painting, but when I compare it to the last self portrait painting I had done, I much rather prefer the newer one.

After I went shopping I also bought new watercolors, so on that day I decided that I didn't want to have to deal with a big clean up, so I painted with the watercolors. This is a medium that I have almost no experience in, and I had serious difficultly making this piece, but for the amount of trouble that I had, I am ultimately proud of the result. 

All of this lead up to what I made yesterday in about an hour and what I finished this morning in another half hour. 

I don't know what happened, but I felt really comfortable working on this piece. I have touched oil paints in almost a month, which is a long time considering that I've only been painting for about four months, and I cranked this out like it was nothing. The colors are something that came out of a different weird light that came from my window, and I had chosen to make it a little more radical.

All in all, I'm super proud of the final piece, and I feel that all that time I spent with charcoal got me better with shading.

Parsons The New School for Design

I went on my first college tour today. During my freshman year I had accompanied my sister on all of her college tours, so I had built a large context of what to expect when I started my tours. I had actually signed up to go on the Eugene Lange tour of The New School, but the people there weren't checking off on lists so I just ended up going to Parsons because that is the school that I would prefer applying to next year. The tour was very generic, but had the New School twist on it and I really fell in love with the school.
First off the tour itself was tiny. I remember that the tours at Northeastern and Boston University were huge. You'd start off in this huge auditorium and it'd take half an hour to split up into groups for the walking portion. Here the intro was in a tiny room and two minutes after it finished, our group was already on its way to the first stop.
Our tour guide was also something that sold me on the school. He was the kind of person that is a learned leader, not a born one. I consider myself someone like that, and the best example I can think of in STAC is Shiana, she can lead a group, but because she learned how to, not because it was just something that came. I could tell that Elias, our guide, had this quality because of the way that he talked, he was quiet, but in the loud kind of way. The reason I liked this so much was because it reinforced what he talked about in the school. Freshmen in Parsons spend that year working more on talking and think about their art. So what I got from him is that after a year at Parsons, he learned to talk, and that was expressed in his tour guiding manner.
Next, there are the buildings. This shouldn't be something so significant in a college decision, but it's extremely hard to ignore it. Everything is beautiful. Not only do the buildings themselves have the modern looking Bauhaus style, but the interior design is an even larger accomplishment in my mind. In their newest building, where we spent about half of the tour, and where we were told a good portion of our classes would take place, each floor had a beautiful design. Their new auditorium was this fantastic space with moving walls to convert it into a number of different areas, from a runway to a stage. Added, there were these wonderful section where the walls and ceiling were painted solid bright colors. The whole thing felt like a playhouse for the mind. I could get ultra creative in a space like that, and I think that's part of the reason why they spend so much money to make these buildings.
What won me over academically was their freshmen year studies. You don't choose a major until your sophomore year, and that relieves me from a lot of stress. I don't know exactly what I want to do, and it's nice to have options. I can apply with basically anything that I make in STAC, and choose something completely new to major in. The program that I'd want to do at their school would be Design and Technology, but I know very little about design or technology now. I am seriously worried about going into anything computer related that requires some sort of portfolio, but I can apply to the school with paintings and films and still go into what I want to do.
Lastly, the Dual Degree program. I like a lot of things, and I have put effort into a lot of things, so I'd feel really bad if I had to give them up, mainly Spanish and French. I love language, and it's something that I'd seriously consider studying if I could put it in a larger context, like study abroad programs. I kind of have a plan set out for Parsons. I'd major in whatever art major i decide upon, and then minor, or double major in French, and take advantage of the Paris campus that the New School has and study there for a while. Spanish is something that I enjoy, but I don't worry about forgetting the language like I would with French. I'll always be speaking in Spanish, I even talk to myself in Spanish, but without a French class I know that I'd forget almost everything I'd learned because I'd have no one to speak with.