Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Feeling sick, but anxious to get to work!

So I'm sick today, been feeling under the weather the past few days, catching all those sniffles and coughs from my peers is always the best. I had a meeting with Jim Cogswell yesterday and honestly it helped me a lot to feel confident and really understand that my work is all experimentation and there are no rules or boundaries. I don't know why, but talking to him really motivated me to continue with my process and push myself to see the possibilities. I think I am just going to focus the rest of my time this year on working on multiple pieces at once, and simply trying to techniques throughout each of them. I want them all to be different, I want them to be chaotic but a beautiful sense of the word. I have a lot of work to do, but I like the direction in which they are going and hearing his feedback really helped. He told me to focus a bit more on my shapes and the way in which I place them on the canvas. I think after my critique at the semester I got a little discouraged and stopped really caring about the way in which I was placing paint on the canvas and just sort of was doing these ovular pieces just to do them. I really think they are obsessive little gems that I enjoy doing, and I don't know why but I don't think that I need to know why. They take different meanings in each of the pieces and I think that this new way in which I am going back into the painting and not being afraid to cover, and lose or gain new perspectives in the work is good. I don't want to get boggled down to one central painting and have them all look alike, I want them each to be their own individual canvases which just so happen to speak to one another within a space. I am having trouble writing my thesis but I think that is because it is all a discovery and I'm not exactly sure how it will all turn out in the end, so writing something so final is a bit difficult for me to do at this point. I understand we need to have a thesis written, but I am just not sure what direction my work is taking and what I am going to keep or what I am going to lose at this point and what exactly is important to me is an end product, I'm just not sure what that will be at this point besides 6-8 large scale abstract oil paintings on canvas. We'll see where it all ends up :) I'm excited and anxious to continue working and hope to be working on 6 pieces as once within the next few days.

2 comments:

  1. Hey Erica,

    Absolutely, it's all about discovery. And you know, lots of people have written meaningfully on interactions of forms and colors. Just keep yourself well-read on formalists, abstract expressionists, color theorists, etc. as a model of how to write about it, and your thesis will come together.

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    1. Even if you're not sure exactly how to talk with finality about your work, focus on what you DO know you're interested in... the relationships between forms. Jim would probably have some great resources for you; take the time to read up. You're not supposed to fill a whole thesis with a complete analysis of your own work, you're supposed to reference the shoulders upon which you're standing, and where you're touching on similar conversations that have happened in the world. (That's meant to be a relief :) You situate yourself, and draw on what else is going on.)

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