How the years fly by! Another semester at school has been finished, surprisingly successfully I might add, and here's a bit of an overview. January, February, May, July, August and September feature personal work, whereas the others were part of a school assignment. Looking back I'm only partially satisfied, I need to improve more! Last year I worked really hard, and was very focused on getting things right, maybe now it's time to fail. After all it's failure that helps us grow more so than success; a concept that frightens me. I have a certain attachment to my work; I identify myself with my work, so the question I've posed to work on in this first month of school is: What happens when I create work that I don't intend to share? Anonymous work, a sort of detachment, where I can say: "This is not my work". And thus not carry any responsibility for what I create. No responsibility of having to create something to my standard of "good, presentable work", not towards others, nor towards myself. No worries. Letting go.
It's hard. It's crazy hard. Today, my first day of getting to work with this project, I realized I'm shying away from precise and more realistic work now. Going abstract almost instantly. I have yet to access whether this would be a good or a bad development, but then again I've only just started. I have no planning other than just drawing and seeing what happens. Trying to fight this fear of creating something terrible, something I couldn't stand is pretty intense. Even now I'm having a hard time convincing myself that no one will see what I made. Because somewhere, my silly head keeps telling me a project for school will never be anonymous. I can't be anonymous from myself, either. It could be more of an acceptation process of myself and my skills than anything. For, moreso than creating something horrible, the feeling of (fake?) non-improvement that comes with it is what frightens me most. Seeing that sometimes I can't draw AT ALL, is depressing. That one thing I clung to when I was younger, drawing, something I measured my own value on, is proving to fall from its pedestal. Not just once, but often. Regularly, even. Yet if this is the method to improve my skills, to lose that cramped necessity of creating something worthwhile, then I have to give it a shot. And so I will.
I don't know what I'm doing. It's scary. It's 2013.
May it be a year of facing fears and growth for everybody! :)
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