new semester -- fall 2010

into my third week of fall semester.  beginning painting I (of II), and personal mythology.  I'll give you a guess on which is my favourite.

really love my mythos class.  I'm focusing on my family.  ...which really means me.  ;^p

BUT I used it as an excuse to sign up on ancestry.com... love it.  I've easily spent over fifteen hours on it in the last two or three days.   found a line to king arthur!  (through campbell, starting with my great⁷ grandmother ...though there are some discrepancies.)

anyway, I'm attempting to mythologize my family.  my dad's a twin.  my mom died when I was youngish.    time, memory, legacy, and identity are interesting & important issues to me.

it also relates to my "I'm in an existential crises, why aren't you?" joke.  which also involves evolution  ...as a species, as a planet, as a[n(?)] universe, and as a family on a macro & micro scale.  everything seems against you in terms of the probability of your existence, yet you're alive.

SO I'm trying to tie that into some kind of a narrative based on my family.   or something.

but I need to do some physical art.

it's just been theory and research so far.  I'm also reading books on iconology, subpersonalities, and incest.

also a memoir.



as for painting I:  I'm painting a still life in four monochromatic scales.  before that, we did ten small quick black&white studies of single objects.

I need to get more ultramarine blue.  and flo-aid.

the starkest difficulty is in learning to paint in an impressionist oil-painting kind of way.  holding the brush at length, lots of paint, quick strokes.  I'm used to a watercolourish method.  still fast and gestural, but less paint. though that is kind of an issue of mine..... conserving/hoarding/rationing.  at least it was in the past, I've gotten better with it.
...in art, and life.

fear is nobody's friend for long.

(though I think part of my preference for watercolour, and less paint, can also be tied to my appreciation of minute details in the mixtures & textures of colour & line.  but that's me focusing on small things. zooming in. and that relates to my interest in 'found compositions' and depth perception. (primarily with photography))

BUT ANYWAY..... I need to make sure my mannerisms don't become academicized.    <--though that's a fear of influence.  hmph.



oh, and I got a B & B+ in drawing & design, respectively.   though I feel my quality decreased over time.  at least in terms of input energy.   and that's another issue.

yay art.