mroe summer

Still more summer. But I'm gladly busy with my quaint (at the worst, pathetic) goals. Like watering my garden in the morning, and I'm still trying to make the best pancakes ever. So far, they involve cornmeal.

And I guess that's what I look forward to: food. Not fast food, not out to dinner, I want to make it. It's a fantasy of failure and having to try again. It's an occupation of time. I want to find some creative way to mix flour, butter, sugar, and milk. It's precious.

I painted half the livingroom, rearranged the furniture, and packed a full garbage bag full of stuff from a sideways bookshelf.

I'm still doing my self-portraits. I don't know when they'll ever be online, but they will. I should probably put an adult-content warning. Nothing explicit, but as a project inherently about body-image, and clothes are unnecessary.

Keeping Busy.

It's been weeks, and everything is still a mess, except, for some reason, my head. One month till my birthday, another and I'm at school. I'm keeping busy:

Gardening. I borrowed a rototiller and cleaned up a plot in the backyard. It's midway through June, but mom already bought the tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. I even consulted my books (what's the point of having them if you don't read them?) to get the spacing and planting right. I love the work. I hope that some day I'll grow my own vegetables.

Painting. I have the paint, I haven't painted my room yet.

Cooking. I'm trying to make the core recipes for next year, make sure I can make real healthy food in a short amount of time with a few ingredients- how much can I do with flour, eggs, butter, sugar? Would it be cheaper to bake my own bread?

Asking Questions. I want to know how businesses and politics work. I love learning about it. What laws govern businesses and religion and politicians and real estate and how they are interpretted. I've become increasingly interested in corruption and I want to be able to understand the economy better than an art student stereotype. I want to have intelligent conversations with people. I'm also preparing myself for the upcoming presidential election.

So, tomorrow, I'll wake up early and make french toast ravioli.
http://www.newlyweds-blog.com/2010/09/23/stuffed-french-toast/.
I probably don't have ricotta, but I'm thinking of putting something else in there, like eggs or PANCAKE BATTER. Pancake in french toast. THIS is what summer is about.

A little catch-up

STACnight. Congrats to the kids who put on an amazing preformance. I heard a lot of "I wish I could have done that" from my fellow alum, and overall, it proved to the parents and the visitors what a compassionate group of kids can do.
It was one of the best, if not the best, STACnight I've been to. It's also my fifth.

At the show, I was asked "are you happy at Pratt". I'm not happy at home. I'm happy when I'm busy. I don't miss the smokers and hipsters and film majors (sometimes all at the same time), but I miss the work.
I'm up to... I think today is #55 of my self-portraits. I don't think I've really seen improvement, but I know that I have to do it every day. I finished a small first sketchbook and started on a new one, which I dislike because felt-tipped pens seep through. I don't think anyone else actually cares about that.
The self-portraits give me 10 minutes a day to think about forming a positive and healthy relationship with my body. To believe, when I am alone, that I am beautiful, or quirky, or interesting, or that I just have big eyes. But I rarely feel ugly. I get down if a pair of jeans doesn't fit the way I'd like it to, but I have a lot of jeans, and I have time.
I have time. I don't know what to do with it. But I have it.
If that was the description of an object, I would throw it out.

I keep going back and forth on my personal religious beliefs. It is very hard to develop a religious opinion without the help of media, ministers, and parents. I don't like religious politics. I like moral lessons through ancient example. I like looking past and understanding context of texts. I hate when religion and politics cross in America.

#400

This is post 400, at the beginning of the 2011 summer.
There are a few things I wanted to do.
I want to finish a few videogames.
Finish reading the Earthsea books, and some of the other books on my shelf. They are technically young adult fantasy.
I've started taking apart my desk, so I should continue that.

I've had 4 cups of tea today. two with morning one with lunch one after dinner and they were all caffeinated so. Maybe I'm addicted to caffeine? Maybe I'll just finish Advanced Wars.

A Deep Breath and a Cup of Tea

Summer, and I always feel like I'm going to do something great and then something blocks the way. okay. I'm not that sick. I just feel lousy. A snot-nosed kid. Doesn't that make me an artist? Being scared by dreams, worrying over nothing, flying from one obsession to another? Does that even matter?

I was recently asked how well I know FinalCut. Is there a way to respond to that? I don't know how to measure how well I know a program, except with a quantity of time/experience and a example of quality. I wish I'd learned by a universal guide.

I've been playing Advanced Wars, Days of Ruin on DS. It's become a personal obsession that reminds me of how much I loved Fire Emblem until all my characters died.

When I was cleaning out my desk, I found a ton of drawings that reminded me of how raw my artwork was in high school. Raw, but so interesting. If I ever get my computer back together, if I ever get a desk to put it on, I'll scan those in. They'll be reprints, but they're still interesting. And I found a poem, too.

So after about 9 months of intensive training, what do we do now?

I don't know. I'm going to finish my tea.

The third: What I learned in college. Year 1.

Time is fluid. I often had many projects to work on for a week, and I had to figure out when I would do them, and fit this around constants. I have a painting due in a week and I'm not doing anything Monday night so I can get it done then but the homework for Wednesday needs to get done Tuesday morning so that I have time Tuesday evening to do Friday's homework. After weeks and weeks of thinking like this, I don't think in any other way.

High school did not prepare me for this time scheduling because if we had homework, it was probably due the next day. I think this forces procrastination. I think this evolution of thinking about time happened when I realized that if I get something done sooner, I don't worry about it.

I realized that as much as I dreaded my drawing class, Professor taught us how to think about the process of the drawing. It wasn't about pencil control or shapes, but about how to see the human figure from the inside out. We break down the human figure into the gesture and then simple shapes.

I learned:
How different kinds of light create color,
how to mix acrylic and oil paint,
how to create any color with the primary colors and white,
how to see color and shadow,
how to make a design interesting,
how to paint from a still life,
how to arrange a still life,
how to use InDesign, Illustrator, FinalCutPro,
how to generally use a Mac
how to mount anything on nice paper,
how to conceptualize a plan into a 3-dimentional shape,
how to cut and rip paper in a straight line,
how to quickly pack,
a decent amount of pre-1800s art history

and I don't know what else. There's a lot that's not in there.

The second: What I had in college. Year 1.

Since packing, bringing everything back, and repacking, I've had a lot of time to reflect on things I've had in college.

Also, not all of them are material. Being home, I sincerely miss not telling anyone where I'm going when I go out, having my own clean existence, and not being able to choose food without caring too much about the price.

I have a lot of stuff. So much stuff. An unbelieveable collection of useless knickknacks, art supplies, clothes, books. And I want to see how far I can go with de-cluttering. Not cleaning yet, just getting rid of all of this useless stuff that I don't use anymore. Make scrapbooks of things, pick up papers from the floor, and do I really need so many books? 3 bookshelves of books and I'm trying so hard to fill boxes for donation. Do I really need two different graphic novel versions of Macbeth? Why do I have these anyway?

There is a specific problem: I have an object that was either a gift or something from a younger me, and I don't know if throwing it out will upset anyone. It may take a few minutes for me to decide. Will my Aunt care if the ceramic teacup gets trashed? What about the "Soup Bible" cookbook I'll never use? Why can't I just get tickets or experiences for gifts instead of things? I keep as many of my tickets as I can, and they fit snugly on a shelf.

How can I throw out the relics of my early teenage years? Or even before that?

I also found and went through a lot of my old sketchbooks. I went through a lot more sketchbooks than I thought. I have a lot of empty ones, too. I shouldn't have to buy art supplies for at least 5 years.

But I've been working on it. I don't know if I'm being heartless and trying to forget middle/high school, or if I'm being realistic and forward-thinking. Probably a bit of both.

Art.

LCD is over, so here is some of the larger pieces of art that didn't fit in the scanner. They're all huge files, and photoshop'd the same way- re-sized, cropped, and making the lights lighter and the darks darker (but not a contrast difference).
1. I think it was a self-portrait at one point, but this is the luminosity painting I did over winter break. Acrylic on Cardboard.
2. the third of the 3d glasses set, this is somewhat cubist. Charcoal and Newspaper.
3. Abstract cubist luminosity/chiaroscuro painting. Acrylic.
4. Foreground, middleground, background exercise, with normal, faux, and sfumato color palettes. Color-aid.