OKAY HERE IT IS

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Here is my final entry.


I guess this post is extra, but it's not like I don't do lots more than one creative thing a week. In other words, this blog was incredibly easy to maintain. Okay so...this piece...I can't relate it to any lecture or reading. I can't really explain to you how it came about. Pretty much, I was drawing and the basic lines appeared, and I realized what I had done. I didn't intend it to be all blue at first, but after I started I had difficulty choosing other colours to complement the areas I had already filled. I used graphite, acrylic paint, chalk, and ink. The whole thing took me two or three days, working sporadically of course. The lines suggest to me something like whiplashes, or cracked glass. I don't really want to go into meaning, because I think the point of art is to communicate a meaning which you otherwise could not. If words could say everything we wouldn't have visual arts, just like if pictures could say anything we wouldn't have words. As this course draws to a close, I realize that most people in it don't actually care about art...and I think art and creativity are synonymous. Everything you do has art in it. There's an art to the way you brush your teeth in the morning, and there's an art to how you tie your shoes. It's right there if you choose to see it. And that is what creative being means.

At first I was going to write about how I got nothing out of this week's lecture, since it was another lecture wherein the lecturer simply told us about a bunch of stuff she did. Which it was, and I think the only time she mentioned creativity at all was at the start when she said it was daunting to be asked to give a lecture on it.

But then I thought more about the lecture, and then I realized that it was about creativity; it was about seeing things a certain way and not just taking them (in art) at face value. I mean, instead of just drawing something the was it looks (or I guess some people would say "the way it is") draw it the way you see it.

So I drew this, which was mostly one line, but since I accidentally swirled off the page a few times there are more like 5 or 6. I'm not really sure why I did it that way... I guess it makes more sense to me, since everything is just energy vibrating at different frequencies, to depict things accordingly; with high-energy motions on the page, and with lines that give a sense of something motionless but also static. I wanted to give it a weird framing too, just to make it more interesting to look at, and I think that made it way more effective than if I had just drawn him, completely unobscured, in the centre of the page.

This week was about personality types; a topic which doesn't really leave a lot of options open for a related creative act. However, one girl in my tutorial said something about not liking having time constraints on her creativity, because she doesn't like to have to output something sub-par or incomplete. This made me think about all the unfinished and mistake-ridden pieces of art which are held up as examples of triumph. What makes something rushed not as good as something slaved over? If you're good at art, you don't need lots of revision, time, or even large amounts of compositional substance (ie. long line count in a poem) to make something good. It's already been said in lecture that art is made up of mistakes. If that's true, and making mistakes is as easy as it seems to be, then art should be easy too.

So in that spirit, I have drawn you this; eyes, and some kind of smoky/elephant trunk thing. It's not intricate, it's not finely detailed, it's quick and automatic, it is me being creative in one short burst and then putting my paper down.

Okay so I've been trying to write about this week's creative act for a long time, and I don't think I can relate it to the lecture in any way, because the lecture this week didn't really do anything for me. I know it was inspirational to a lot of people, but I already knew to just do what I want to do instead of thinking about it. In fact, I find it disappointing to know that some people didn't already know that.

BUT, I did enjoy doing my creative act this week. I don't think I can really explain to you what it is, because I don't even know. It's tempura and acrylic paint, I mixed the tempura myself, with water, not egg. I spent about three hours on this, it took me a few sessions over the course of a day. I think that the Earth getting sucked into the giant green thing came out really cool looking. I wasn't really trying to do anything with this piece, so you can take it in whatever context you want. The value of this painting for me comes from the amount of fun I had making it.

Okay so first off: dear whoever is marking this, at the time of writing this I still have not received any feedback on my blog, so please keep that in mind.

Alright, so this week in our tutorial we discussed what was said in the lecture about the unconscious mind and how it affects creativity. But also, we drew representations of our own unconscious minds (ID, Shadow, Persona, Conscience).

A few problems with that. First of all, if our unconscious minds DO affect creativity, how will that affect a visual representation of the unconscious mind? Does the unconscious mind care that we discuss it? Second of all, consciously trying to represent the unconscious could be compared to trying to write in pencil using a pen.

So what do I do then, how do I draw this hidden part of myself? Is it even a part of myself, or is it something separate sharing my brain?

All of this is what I thought about while I drew, and in the end I had a picture of my unconscious mind which I had only been half-paying attention to drawing. That was the closest I could come to letting my subconscious do my work, short of asking it to do so in a dream, or on some psychedelic drugs.

So for my creative act, I kept that drawing, took it home, redrew it on a square piece of cardboard and painted it.



Ninety percent of what you see is acrylic, some of it is in, and one color is done in tempura. (Yes I mixed it myself, but no I did not use egg, I used water.) It's not exactly how my original drawing looked, because I omitted some things, added some stuff, moved this and that around, and obviously added colour. This was actually my most fun-to-do creative act so far, and it took me quite some time too, I worked on it for four days.