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...