Summer Plan

Since the summer is here and school is over, I probably won't be blogging as frequently, but I thought that I'd write this post to try and sum up everything I'll be doing this summer, artistic and not, so that if I do write another post about one or more of these things you all can have some context.
1. Ganes' Art Class
This is probably the most exciting thing I have planned for this summer. Right now I'm in this purgatory of sorts, waiting for the class, and consequently my summer, to start. I'm taking the class with Vika which is good because it means that she can give me a ride in the mornings so I don't have to take a bus, and because Vika is super cool and it's awesome to have someone you know when you go into a program like this. It's five hours a day of art. That's a comfortable amount of time. What I'm really excited for is some more hands on instruction, and getting portfolio pieces ready, even though I'm not 100% sure if I'm am going to apply to school that need portfolios.
2. French Classes
Again this summer, I am taking French classes at FI:AF in Manhattan. Next year I am taking French 4, which means that I'm jumping French 3. I am confident that I'd do fine in the class next september without the summer classes, but my goal with French isn't to just get by, I plan to have some level of verbal fluency by the end of my senior year. Being trilingual has always been a dream of mine. Learning language exposes you to an entire new collection of ideas and experiences. Especially when you are in the art world, having a knowledge of any other language let's you experience so many other culture's writing, actors, films, in a way that you can't experience with just knowing one language. The summer French class is also in preparation for the next activity on my list.
3. Canadian Universities
In my searches for what schools I'll be applying to this fall, I discovered the gem of education that is Canada. Schools are cheaper, the drinking age is lower, and French. I have no illusions that I'd be ready to go to an all French University in Quebec, but there are a number of English Universities and bilingual ones in Quebec and the rest of Canada. I have two schools that I have fallen in love with, one more than another, but both are incredible. My second favorite is York University and I'd study at the Glendon College campus. York is in Toronto, which isn't my preferred area of Canada, but Glendon is a really awesome school. They whole school is bilingual, and very internationally diverse. I don't want to study language as a major, but I want to be fluent and continue it, which is what Glendon gives. They don't have any major that I'm crazy about, but I could focus a lot on my French and Spanish there, and get the trilingual degree that they offer in an area that I have some interest in, like international studies. My current favorite school is an English school in Montreal called Concordia University. It's an english school first of all, so I could comfortably understand all of my classes, and it's in a French city, so I could get the experience of having to order coffee and ask for directions in French. Concordia has all the programs that I could want to take, because right now I'm not sure what I'd want to do, but the school is large and has all the options I could want. I have tours scheduled to see these school this summer, and I'm super excited. They are going to take up a lot of time for me this summer because of the whole international aspect. There is no CommonApp option for these schools and the application process for international students is always harder.  In addition to visiting the schools, I also have to prepare the requirements for the schools' applications and start to look into student visas for Canada.
4. Gym
I'm going a gym. Even though exercise doesn't seem like an inherently artistic thing, I actually do view it as an artistic venture. It's a matter of will, like my 365. I can run on my treadmill everyday for half an hour, but after a week I give up. That's what's happened to most of the people who've tried a 365. It's a couple hours a week of my life so that I can live longer and look better. And it can teach me how to bear through something uncomfortable so that I can be happier overall.
5. Guitar
I've gotten pretty good at playing the chords along to the songs that I like. I put this towards the end because it's generally a minor thing for me this summer. I'm going to take a class a week, but it's definitely just something for myself because it makes me feel good.

Update

 

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.