This week I focused on making. The physical objects...something visually and technically intriguing to me and hopefully others. Making work as my alter-ego Christine, who does anything she wants, when she pleases, let me step outside my grand plans and look at what I really love to do--painting. I had a bit of an identity crisis related to painting because while I wanted to explore and try new ways of approaching painting and my painting process, I sort of turned my back on how and what I like to paint. This was for a specific class and with specific assignments and with what I felt was a specific "ideal" of what painting meant and what we, as students should strive for. I was feeling a lot of pressure to make paintings in this way, and I tried. Oh how I tried. And however much I tried to change my painting, it wasn't received well. But I felt if I did what I love to do--portraits, it wouldn't have been well-received either. I think that was just a perceived limitation I put on myself because I was questioning the validity of portrait-making and what it all meant on a grander scale. In some aspects, they become rote, dry, or boring. I didn't want to create something purely technical that may mean a lot to me, but not mean anything to other people.
While this history may seem somewhat unrelated to my Integrative Project and how I went about formulating my idea, it is very much the essence of how I approached the whole thing. I was afraid to paint again. I know I can paint, and I know I can paint well, but instead of me worrying about other people finding meaning in it, I was really worried about whether I could find true meaning in my own work. I wanted there to be something more to the painting, so I decided to just skip the subject altogether.
Enter the marionette/doll idea I've been working on. I knew I wanted to work with memory and I had worked with marionette making before and really liked it, so an idea was born. I'll post my first and second iterations of my idea in the next post, so you all can read what it is about. The point is, I was all geared up and excited about this new idea that I didn't really remember my old passion, painting. I am not me without it.
Being Christine, the type-A personality, fur-wearing, unapologetic narcissist who has little regard for the feelings of others, allowed me to do "whatever the hell I felt like doing", which was painting small gouache portraits of people I liked. Ahh, painting. My old friend, you're back! Painting those portraits reignited the fire of my love for technical rendering of faces. I looked at the puppets I had made, and something was missing. Real, human features. Things caricature-esque sculpture of a face can't really express. It's like the difference between having eye contact and not having eye contact with a person. Even walking down the street and looking a stranger in the eye ignites something very human within each person, as if asking "Do I recognize you? Are you a part of me? Should you be?" The puppets I made did not feel like they were breathing, did not have that spark. So I got the idea to utilize my painting skills (and love for painting people) and combine oil portraiture on the actual sculptured puppets/dolls. From the experimenting I've done, I really like the results. I'm excited and I just want to make. Make make make.
Next week's log will include the refinements I've been thinking about and making to my idea: honing in on what aspects of memory I want to convey. Here are some photos:
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