Time to get serious

Christmas was a good break. School starts in one week--it's time to get serious.

I painted this morning for a couple hours, and I was surprised how "out of it" I felt. Not painting for a week messed me up, but I am glad I am trying to get back in the groove before school starts. I am going in tomorrow and painting again.

I was really feeling frustrated with this picture today, of course, because it is new and it's what I always do-get mad at new things. I was getting irritated with the color but then realized that it wasn't color that was upsetting me. The fear of the unknown, the stress of Thesis starting in a week, and feeling like it didn't make "sense," that's what frustrated me. When I say make "sense" I don't mean that it's a concrete thing has happened in the world and exists in reality. You know a picture makes sense because you feel it with your eyes. It doesn't have to be realistic, but it just feels good.

I need to nail down what it is exactly about these paintings that I am trying to communicate. There's a lot in them, that I don't even understand.

These things I know for sure:

My paintings stem from personal experience.

The figures represent me 50% of the time, and the other 50% of the time they represent significant people in my life.

I see symbolism in everything.

Often when I am painting, I am trying to portray an experience or a feeling. Mostly what I have experienced--the pictures are a record but also a translation.

I am interested in painting as the manifestation of human experience.

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This week will be spent on refining my artist statement (which is fairly up-to-date), and working on my Thesis proposal. I know for a fact that I want to have at least 3-4 large scale paintings in my show. I also want to incorporate video and some time of interactive sculpture. The first thing that comes to mind, is a pile of mummy-hybrid people, probably sculpted out of some kind of light fabric. The bodies will serve the purpose of a projection screen for my video animation, but also as a sculpture. I want the two media to interact. Lastly, if I had time, I would want to create some kind of sound piece, similar to one that I saw (well, heard) in Italy this last summer.

These are some "interactive" art projections that I am sourcing inspiration from:

hybrids, death, space, meaning, fear, puppets, and other ramblings.

Knowing why I do what I do is important to me, but it can also be a burden. I really have the tendencies to over-think just about everything, including my art work. My work has made leaps and bounds in the last couple months. It has been a hard run discovering these new images and wrestling with their meaning. There is a lot of personal experience imbedded in my pictures. I know for a fact this is why I run away from everything new I create. My images create a dichotomy between my life and what painting is. They mediate what is. I think the thing I fear the most about my pictures, is that not even I can understand them. I know other people won't "get" what it's about, and I don't expect them to. It's important to me though--to analyze them and often when I do, I see a lot of myself in them. 

The hybrid idea has taken on a whole new meaning. It lends itself to spaces now, not just figures. This is always been something I have been interested in--the spaces people make. A phrase that has popped into my head countless times in the last year. Of course I mean both the spaces in your mind, and the spaces in a physical environment. When I look at my pictures, I see a lot of meaning. I see a lot of symbolism and metaphor. How they all work together, I am not sure yet. I am still interested in the theme of puppetry, of control. My puppets have become more morbid and dark as I have worked with them. It's almost as if the pictures I made before, with the palette cut-outs, were a mask for what I truly wanted to paint. I remember someone saying last semester in crit, "Your pictures are too nice."It was very true, so much that it bothered me, and made me realize that it really isn't what I wanted to be doing. Those elements of my painting experience were definitely necessary to where I have landed presently, but I am glad to have moved on from that. 

In my current painting, I am dealing with architecture. Heavily influenced by Matthias Weischer, I am creating hybrid rooms. I think this new content developed from my hybrid figures, because I was yearning for a place to put them. No only that, but a room in itself can be a very personal thing. It can encompass a lot of memories, and can be indicative of a certain experience. As a painter, I can force the viewer INTO an experience. Into my experience of a hybrid, alternate reality.