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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.

So yesterday I still hadn't done my creative act, but I was thinking about what was said in the lecture about the artist wanting to escape this reality and live in their own. And I was thinking about how everyone lives in their own reality anyway, since we interpret the world privately inside our own heads, and how that gives reality to thoughts and ideas that exist only to ourselves. More literally though, I thought about, if people could choose their realities, their physical realities, how they would shape them and inhabit them. So I thought I would draw my own.



I used chalk pastels, which I had never done before, and I found them quite a bit easier to manage than oil pastels. I drew in layers, smudging them lower layers, and leaving the upper layers be, which is what I normally do with pastels, and I think it came out nice, the colors were what I wanted, and the figures were automatic shapes, because I thought I should throw in a more subconscious interpretation of how I look at people.

After the lecture this week, I was thinking a lot about creative processes, and the different way we come up for ideas for art. It seemed to me that most of the artists we looked at (ie. DaVinci & Michelangelo) had very deliberate and precise creative processes. They sketched and prepared, and then during the creation of art, they worked slowly and with care.

Then I thought about automatism, and I wondered if letting your mind work uninhibitedly is actually more creative than forcing your creativity to converge on one theme/piece. More clearly, is your subconscious more creative than you?

And I was thinking about this for a few days, not knowing what I wanted my creative act to be. Then on Saturday night, I was sitting with my friends, and I pulled out my sketchbook and I just started to write. Half of what I was writing was what I was overhearing from their conversation, and half of it was me just writing continuously. I wanted to make something beautiful and strange, and I think I succeeded; this poem is what came out:

and the we decided
we felt like the house
doesn't belong to us
when you're in the midst
seriously and it's so much more
to be up here than what it
sounds like to you in so many different ways

It's not painted but....

I haven't decided what my next creative thing is going to be yet, but I hope you like this one. I tried painting my inhibition for you three times, and they were all crap, so I did this, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to use it, and then last night I dropped my sketchbook like forty feet, onto a parking lot. (It's kind of a long story, I was trying to carry these shoes that I found and I had 3.2 litres of apple juice in my bag...) Anyway, I dropped my book and it opened to this page so...

Okay so this week, I'm going to paint you a picture of my inhibition, but right now what I wanted to do was address the nature of this week's discussion. I hope that I don't sound facetious, but shouldn't we already know by now that material possessions don't make you happy, and that your worldview is vastly different depending on where you come from? I hope those concepts are very clear to people, and if they are, then why discuss them? A conversation like that doesn't really push anyone's mind to their limits of thinking, it just holds them in place over the things they already know.

Osama's point about nature was interesting however. I always feel more comfortable barefoot, or in the forest, and I bet most people would if they slowed their lives down and paid more real attention to Earth. This planet is our mother, and being close to nature is the most natural thing a person can do; for millions (billions?) of years of evolution, every creature has lived in nature. Now we have separated ourselves from it and our worlds are on fire. Of course you function better in nature, it's in your blood, it's in your subconscious, your instincts will cause you to feel peaceful and at ease if you allow them to.

Osama also made a good point about being connected to the universe. Isn't it weird to think how everything is essentially made up of the same stuff? I mean, (pretty much) everything is just made of protons and neutrons and electrons reacting in different ways and arranged in different orders. That's why when you die, your body returns to Earth and you become assimilated and there is no trace of you ever having been anywhere. That's beautiful to me.

So, um yeah I bought a harp on Saturday. I definitely can barely play it, but learning hasn't been that hard so far, and i finally got it nice and in tune yesterday, so it sounds really good. I figure it's pretty much just a piano with no hammers or keys, and since I can play okay piano, I can probably become at least as good at harp, but maybe better too, because I can take it more places than a piano.

Oh yeah, tying this in to class, we discussed doing original and new things. I haven't ever seen anyone else with a harp in their hands, so that clearly makes it at least partly original. Also I've never ever played, held, or looked at a harp before Saturday. Unless I was a harpist in a past life or something, but that doesn't count does it?

The value of things, especially art, is a concept which troubles me a lot. Why is any thing, even a non-creative thing, important? Because we make them important, anything that is valued is only valued because someone said it was so. This is something which bothers me and I'm sure it bothers other artists too, because obviously we all want someone to look at something we made and say "this is good, this is something people want to see," but sometimes it seems like people's choices are really arbitrary.

But how do you move your work from your desk, to someone else's bookshelf, wall, whatever? You do it yourself.



Maybe you are very smart and already know what this is. Or maybe you are still very smart, but also don't know what this is, and that's okay too. This is a zine, and I know you might think "oh, like magazine" except it actually came from shortening "fanzine" but that's a different topic (history) and not very many zines have to do with being fans any more.

Rather, they have to do with things like politics and art and environmental issues. Some of them are about local music scenes, so I guess I lied about the fan thing. But this is still a different topic, the real point is a zine is a self-published piece of art. This is the second one I've printed, and right now I only have five copies. My first one ran 21 copies which I gave out to various people over the course of a couple of weeks. It wasn't that good, it wasn't horrible, but it wasn't amazing either. Neither is this one, but it's better. The actual creation of the original pages took about three weeks, because I made more than I wanted to include, so I could throw away the bits that were just "pretty good". I won't show you what's in it, you have to ask me very nicely in person and I will give you your very own.

If you feel disappointed that I used something I'd been working on for a while, instead of making something totally new just for Creative Being, then don't worry because so do I, and I'll probably just do something else this week anyway.