My recent art in school showed me a new perceptive about art. I rarely did any paintings, instead I got more into making works, experimenting with ideas and flowing with my thoughts and seeing where they take me. The difference with the works I was creating and the paintings I used to create, was with painting I always had an initial idea, an initial way the painting was meant to look and the certain message it was based around, but with my new projects in school, not having that gave my works a fluidity that I found beautiful and insightful.
I would start with initial ideas no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, and they would grow and morph into so many different things, taking me on a journey through it all, a journey that taught me more about myself. Each work took me into my own head, on a journey though my mind, and an experience of watching how thoughts came to reality and how ideas and thoughts were always entangled in a dance with one another. Like Robin Sealark said, making was the process of not only getting through the "big questions" I had in my mind, but also a process of discovering new big questions about myself and finding understanding.
By my second project, 'Journal', I began to use art and the process of making as a means for me to better understand myself and work through how I feel and how I see myself. My art became an exploration of me, it became more personal than audience based. I realized that before my art was for an audience, it is for me... It takes me on a journey of its own, a journey of introspection that only I can experience. Before it is for the world, it was and is a tale for me.
I definitely think my relationship with my art has improved and grown a lot since my first year of Art School and coming back home, I think at first it retained that relationship, but over time it has seem to slowly fade and morph into something else. For the past month and a few weeks on that, I have been really obsessive over my art, wanting it to look a certain way or feel a certain way or be a certain way or portray a certain look and I think that has been a projection of my feelings and my obsession over my emotions, wanting them to look a certain way or feel a certain way or write a certain way, but that hasn't been working out.
Right now and over the past weeks, my mind has been messy and all over the place. Rather than calm and collected as I try to make my writings or peaceful like I try to make my photographs, it has been upside down and downside up. I do not and have not felt at peace for a while. I have had moments in the day that are peaceful and calm and content and happy, but overall I have been feeling a lot of things, from out or sorts, to confused, to sad and a little down, to scared, to unsettled, to conflicted, to torn and in all just, not feeling it at all. Not feeling like 'myself' and slowly losing the motivation to create. Sometimes I do it because I feel like I should, like this website. I 'should' create it, I 'should' be working on it, because how can I say I want to make my decision and not be doing anything? There's this sense of force to create that comes with this feeling of responsibility, this feeling of obligation towards my decision. Yet, it's all based off this innate feeling of uncertainty. A lack of faith and a lack of belief in what I am doing and in the decision I am making, because even if i create this website or I create that painting, I still can't see a way. I still can't tell how things are going to work. So, I just feel defeated and unmotivated.
And it almost feels like there is and ache in my heart, a clenching feeling when I want to try. Like I have to push through a wall of doubt and judgement before I create and I slowly lose the freedom of fluidity of my work. The freedom and fluidity that doesn't hold on to how things will turn out or look or hold on to one thing as the way, but instead just gives into the beauty and experience of simply creating. The peace of simply trusting the processes and seeing where it take you, quite literally. I face my fear of trusting, the inability to just be guided by the process, because I think it is too much of a risk, because I feel like I have to know, but the reality is I don't. I can't see ten miles ahead, I can't see the end. I can't tell you what I think you want to hear. All I can see is here, right here and the little steps I want to take towards what I want. To slowly give into that freedom and fluidity of creating. To trust that process again and to trust myself.
I do want to cry. I do want to cry a bit. Not to yell, not in anger, just in sadness and overwhelment. To cry in acknowledgement to everything. In acknowledgement of everything I am feeling. In acknowledgement of all the emotions. In acknowledgement and slow release...