Plight of the Undergraduate Artist

-----I sit here, wondering how to start, the same plight I have with everything else that's supposed to be done this year. I'm not procrastinating, or at least I don't think I am; despite how often it's the chronic disease of a student. I sit inside my studio, not sure where to began, so I simply began. I sketch, I draw, I paint, I print. I still feel like I don't have anything. Perhaps it's the pressures I put on my self, expecting this limited experience artist to create something as I think it should be. I want to control it too much. Maybe I need to let go.....

-----How can something so simple, be so hard to tackle? I know it's good for me, and for my work, but it'd be nice if everything just drip from me onto the canvas. I make little breakthroughs-- a realization here in print, an application of paint there in studio. It's like I'm twelve years old again-- I can't really piddle around in the mud or make grass soup from creek water anymore, it's not the same, but I can't figure out how to wear a pair of heels with jeans yet either. Limbo. Do, do, do, is all I keep telling myself, and eventually, I'll find the road; eventually I'll figure out the map, and eventually I'll figure out the language of the country.

-----As an undergraduate, you hit a strange wall in your pre-graduate career. You're told to take particular classes, hone your skill and build your experience. Paint a landscape; build a wire armature or learn how to throw clay on a wheel-- then, you start to mature in your field. You ask yourslef how can you create a concept, emotion, and purpose to the landscape? How can you mark it? And even more importantly, how can you sucessfully mark it? All baby steps. Let's learn to paint. Lets learn to bond with paint; then let's carry a relationship with paint, that continues to grow in application and use-- introducing new mediums, techniques until you've grown enough out of those pre-adstract years where you're hitting your teens and you're wondering how to look at the world in such a broad and abstract way, your mind is bending and turning in ways you're not sure will allow it to ever come back-- a good thing when one thinks of it. Someone once told me that once the mind has been expanded, it cannot contract again. It is the expanding into unknown regions that makes it confusing. Wonderful, exciting, but confusing. Only through the exposure of medium, and the help of the experiance do we learn how something is properly used, so we can later work it to our advantage. C.S. Lewis once said "Experiance: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn." It would be easy, and maybe pleasent if there was a perfect set formula for these walls we face, but there isn't. Subjectivity allows for the always moving world of our work to grow, receed, but eventually, always expand to greater heights and fuller depths. Unfortunately, the only way through is perseverence--- all these frustrations are (so I tell myself) a good thing to experiance, and all I should do is do my best.

-----Here comes the emotion to all this. The questions that crop up when our work doesn't come as easily as it has. When we wonder if we're even any good to claim ourselves a seat beside our fellow artists. "Am I really doing my best?", "I'm I really as lost as I think I am?", or "What if this doesn't go anywhere?" My first and foremost answer to this, especially if you are an undergraduate near graduation who's also facing these issues is the book Art and Fear: Observations of the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, written by David Bayles and Ted Orland.

-----I had the pleasure of reading this book. I found the best encouragement and observations every artist should experience at least once; Bayles and Orland approach the common fears new and veteran artists face throughout their career. The fears that one may not make it as an artist, that one's art may not be liked, or that ever strenuous fear of falling out of discipline and the tension we feel if we're not making art and the tension we feel while making art.
-----Some places you can purchase this book online are at Amazon.com and Barnes&Noble.com. You could also try your local bookstore or other online sources if you simply search online by using the title.

-----I'll leave you now to chew on my complaints and resources. There's irony I think in this blog. I complain, but I feel I know the solutions already-- I hope you all do too.

-----Many more posts to come, though not anytime too soon, as I hope to keep things slow and steady so there's due time to view each blog without having to scroll through. Lots of things are running through my head right now-- a spring break will be due. Have a wonderful March! Feel free to leave comments, suggestions and resources if you like! ~Issa