Pretending like Comets

"Comets."  .................................................................2008

"Wood and Iron."  .....................................................2009

Love and Live (No Regrets).

I've been really in tune with nature these past few days; the moon has been blindingly bright in the early mornings, and at the woods today, I had a school of fish following me, as well as several butterflies and dragonflies. I wish I could have that every day.

"Self Portrait"  .................................2009

I did this piece late in the year it was done, but it was how I always wanted to feel. Now I feel it. Now I'm the living creature I've always wanted to be. And I couldn't be happier.

BOGUS.

It is the greatest feeling to shake the hand of a stranger who has eyes as dark as your imagination can fathom.

"Victims of War."  ..............................................2010

Shit Circumstances.

"Journal Pages 7-8"  ......................................................2010

Yeah, sometimes things aren't great. But they could be worse.

With no means of transportation on this fine Summer day, I'm cooped up and slowly losing my mind to nothing, just that sacred boredom that I'll probably wish for during the school year. I'm so used to my adventures into the wood, that my bedroom has no current comfort, not until the end of the day when I'm too tired to give a fuck.

Is that weird? To feel more at home outside than in your own room? Sometimes I do feel that way- in fact, often I do. It's something about the smell in the air. When I'm in my bedroom, there's nothing. It smells like nothing. When I'm outside, there's everything. There's wet grass and soil, sunflowers, the fishy river...There is just everything. But would I want to sleep out there? For more than just a camping trip? Probably not. I'm normal in the sense that I don't tend to like bugs crawling on me. 

I did when I was young, though. I was the one trying to keep spiders and ants as pets in shoe boxes. I would take a cotton ball, soak it with water, and place that and some grass into a shoe box, and then the bug I caught. Next morning, without fail, they were always gone. But I never felt that sad about it. It was as if I somehow knew it would be temporary, even if my family never said a thing about it. I was okay with the idea of gaining and losing a friend, all in the matter of a day. 

This has derailed completely.

I really do love cow skulls.

"Real Bad Things" ......................................................2009

Composition has never been a strong component to my work, but it is something I would like to understand. I've read a few art context and design books this summer, two of which stick out to me quite a bit for some reason, and I believe it will help me improve as time goes on. Not that my pieces have to have the perfect composition in order to be good, but it helps to be knowledgeable in various points of art.

"Real Bad Things" was a piece that I really wanted to focus on composition and theme with, and while to some extent there are small things I might like to fix now, a whole year or more later, I do think I succeeded in creating the portrait that I wanted to. This was the beginning of who I am as an artist, the very first opportunity I was given to not just express through paint, but to be who I was, regardless of a teacher's opinion of the style in which I worked. It frightens me to be critiqued by someone who either doesn't understand my work, or just decides that they hate it and will judge it based on that. I believe no matter what the style of work, regardless of my liking it or not, I can fairly critique someone, both on good and bad points.

Take for example, my love/hate relationship with Mark Rothko's work. I still do not fully understand what his work is; it's an entirely separate monster from the art that I am used to buying, seeing, etc. But despite the fact that I may not ever want a piece of his hanging on my bedroom wall, I have to give special recognition to the fact that his work does make one feel something. It just takes eyes opened a little wider than one might be comfortable with. I know I wasn't. It took me years to finally work up the gut to stare at his untitled painting, '1953-54', for a mere fifteen minutes in order to hallucinate this:

"Study - Rothko"  .........................................................2010

Though the actual piece hanging at AIC (Art Institute of Chicago) is warm and cozy, I imagined death. This heart was beating itself dry. I don't know why I saw it, but it was clearer than crystal.

"Konk out, mother fucker!"

"Imminent-Journal"  ............................................2010

My grogginess easily took over last night; posts thusly consisted of visuals only. I'm finding great comfort in this new sketchbook, journal, whatever it's considered to be...Everything flows better and what I really want to convey is sparking straight out on to the paper. The texture's nice, too.

Tonight I'll have some drinks and forget what being paid means or how heavy the ache is in my body. I might just talk to another artist as well. Might just.

This boy's face won't stop appearing in my mind; I need to work on my comic and VERY soon.

"Philosophy - Study"  ....................................................2009

"Poet's Notebook I  ....................................................2010

Eyes rubbed raw.

"Dev"  ..................................................................2010

I felt like I was lying, but I really wasn't. The shit BURNED.

I'm going to spend my time reading books about art I will not produce, nor surpass, but rather allude to and honor in my own work. All the while, trying not to put my fingers anywhere near my eye sockets. I have the slightest of headaches.

I had the chance to see superheroes today, but I suppose it'll just have to wait until another time. They're so far away, and the sun is too bright to handle completely.

Happy Birthday, love.

"Dead Tradition."  ......................................................2010

Today I mainly consider real critique versus the opportunity to poke fun at someone, most of all a scorned individual. I am guilty of this, and despite my attempts at excuse, sometimes it was just plain insulting going on. I feel jabbed to know that some of the students in my class barely give two fucks about art and go to the Academy to get a piece of paper that says they did something with their life. Especially when there are students, much like my closest friends and myself, that want to make something of their work. And here we sit, wasting our time even bothering to give the lazy shit's work a glance, wasting our money and teachers instead of dedicating time to those that really want this. You might ask, "But how can you tell?"

You can fucking tell.

If someone at least has the energy to fake giving a fuck, then I should try to pretend as well when critiquing their work. In recent years I have, my freshman year? Not so much. I was still freshly mean from my high school years. You learn these lessons eventually.

Now I am stuck in one. Does she mean it? Or does she hate me?

Poor Indians, I wish they'd come back.

"kapteeni mielipuoli ei anna armoa!"

"Changes";   ............................................................2010

I wonder to myself if anyone else out there could feel truly as alien as I feel sometimes. I do strange things that are not typical of the norm. Nothing dangerous or criminal; trivial acts such as an incessant need to wade through water when I see it, walking barefoot in school, smelling freshly cut grass or new books. I hear about people like me, read about these eccentric characters in fictional books, but I've never met someone quite like me.

I'm looked at like my skin is green if I paint on the edge of a dock, spilling shit everywhere. Even people closest to me seem to always poke fun at my habits, which doesn't really bother me, but it does make me think about this state of 'just being me'. Slowly but surely my mind is on a set expansion in my life as I bump into new people, however it's never quite the same. There's always the awkward silence between meeting conversations, driving around and watching nothing, counting the seconds until we just get the hell out of the car. I'm far too social to be silent for long.

Each person is their own individual.

But we don't seem to accept that entirely. It's awkward if someone has habits that are unusual to us.

They must be crazy.

I must be absolutely fucking nuts!