This Past Week:
Saturday I took the Arts Outta Town bus to the Grand Rapids Art Prize (see previous post for more) in hopes to clear my mind, see what other artist were doing in the world, and find possible inspiration (6 hours spent at the show). As I said before, going through the show really let my mind wander and allowed me to realize I can feel free to experiment with any medium of choice to express my concept/ideas.
Sunday was spent reading a piece from Art and Discontent by Thomas McEvilley (1hr). This piece was great as it discussed a number of concepts and themes and opened my eyes to various processes and materials artist work with to form their work around. I especially liked the passage on "Content rooted in biological or physiological responses," as I felt much of what was said here pertains to my interests in other artists and my own work.
Sunday and Monday night (7 hours), along with all of Studio Tuesday morning and part of the afternoon (4 hours), I spent reading from the 5 books Janie gave me, a piece Amanda sent me, and watched a video on Art and Ecology. I took notes and quotes that interested me from all of these (which mind you was a ton! I filled about 8 pages of lined notebook paper with this stuff) and was really able to sort through my ideas on what my interests were with nature specifically.
Wednesday night I began to struggle a bit, so instead of focusing on writing my self-review I spent time researching, watching videos, reading blogs, etc. on other environmental and land artists throughout the past decades and created another inspiration archive folder on my computer (3 hours). This was a good break from the specific topics I was just focusing on and opened me to a broader view on nature and art.
Still though, by Thursday the only problems I was running into was narrowing my focus, trying to chose between a few conflicting ideas; like do I still incorporate my family strongly in the piece or is it time to let that go and subtly show through my process? How strong of a political voice do I want to have in my piece? I find the concept of children becoming more and more disconnected to nature to be a huge issue in our society today and it hits a spot in my heart pretty hard to realize the facts provided, partially because nature was such a big part of my childhood.
Therefore, Thursday morning was spent sorting through these questions and trying to find the answers to them (3 hours). The processes of writing the "Mock Review" of my final piece really helped me solve some of these issues and come to conclusions about what I want. Therefore, I am quite satisfied with where I am in my thinking processes and am ready to complete my proposal :) YAY!
Thursday afternoon, after a short discussion as a class, I immediately let my ideas pour into my sketch book and the idea of "Nesting" became something was really spiking my interest! You can read more about this when I post my project proposal...
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