Sunday 30 March 2008

Rabble Rabble

I’m not quite sure what on earth to write on this blog anymore, but I’m starting to get guilt tripped into paying more attention to this blog, I’ve kind of completely ignored it since we started the group project, but that’s going to change now.

I hoped I would be a bit more driven this Easter break to really knuckle down and just throw myself into doing work, but I guess the temptation of chocolate and games proved a bit too appealing over the last two weeks. I recently bought Guitar Hero 3, Beautiful Katamari and Lost Odyssey, all in the same week- so I’ve been a bit busy “researching”.

However I haven’t been completely devoid of artist thought of the weeks, I visited an Arts and crafts show and got to meet one of my favourite landscape watercolour artists, Keith Fenwick. We had a discussion about the teaching of art and how it was handled in schools, so I found that pretty interesting to listen to.

It got me thinking about why I wanted to create art in the first place and what aspect about art that I had always liked. I had pretty much made up my mind that I wanted to do something creative and had always strived to do things my own way. One thing that I continue to worry about is my failure at taking criticism, I overly criticise my own work however if anyone else criticises it then I get overly defensive about its flaws, this is one thing that I struggle with in art, that anything you create will never be perfect and that someone will dislike it. However if someone dislikes your work or finds mistakes with it then surely it must encourage you to become better and iron out those little flaws with your work. Although it’s necessary to listen to criticism to become better, it’s is still one of the hardest things I find about art, it’s even harder to listen to the little critic in my head which will find flaws that no one else sees, as it makes making the first mark on paper ever more harder then it was in the first place.

However I do believe that one of my greatest weaknesses is also one of my strengths since I won’t get complacent with my level of work, so I’ll keep pushing my standard, which is a good thing.

I love creating things, thinking up ideas or a cool concept, I like having the freedom and imagination to produce paintings, drawings and models from thoughts that I’ve had, I have many outlets to show people my ideas which is something I’ve always loved about art. However the more I think about that, then the more I think of art as one big ego trip, am I drawing because I want to draw for myself or am I drawing because a small part of me wants people to think that I’m creative and imaginative and I want to show off. I think that I’ve probably just contradicted myself in saying that I have not enough pride in my work yet I have just enough pride to want to show it off. I guess these thoughts plague every artist every now and then, everyone that has to rely on talent and ability for their career must have thoughts like “What if I can’t do this.” Or “What if it’s not good enough.”

I spoke to comic book artist John McCrea a while back and I guess one of the most valuable things that he thought me was that as an artist you are always going to have your bad days where you’ll think that you are the worst drawer in the world and then you’ll have your good days where you think you’re better then everyone, but the key is to never actually believe any of them because you’ll always find that someone is better then you and that you will be better then someone else eventually, so don’t let it get to you.

Another piece of good advice I heard was that “For every good drawing you do, you’ll produce 1000 bad ones.” It’s not the most hopeful pieces of advice I’ve been given but it keeps things in check.

Well I guess I’ve rambled on a fair bit, but at least I’m not neglecting my blog, and now for some more “researching” on Lost Odyssey.