Art-istential Crises
Mon, April 4 2022:
It’s only Monday (technically early Tuesday morning since it is 2:30 am) and I already feel like I’ve gone through an art related existential crisis.
My program really likes to focus on our relationships with visual culture, and how this relationship has shaped our current art practice. We started the first semester with presentations about the visual culture we were exposed to, and the visual culture we consumed growing up. We are ending our second semester with an “apologia” project, which is a deep dive, once again, into our influences, our relationships with art, and why we make the kinds of things we do. This is paired with our “mini thesis” projects, which are supposed to give us a taste for the year long thesis project that we work on next year. Both these projects, perhaps consciously so, expect me to narrow down on the focus of my art practice, and make a decision about the kind of work I want to make. It feels exhausting to do this kind of background work, when I would rather just be making more illustrations.
Over the last year I have been hopping from project to project, avoiding thinking about how it would all fall into a coherent body of work. So far, my classmates and I have all made a comic, a card game, a poster, a set of gifs, a couple of editorial illustrations, and a bunch of zines. A lot of people have been able to maintain a consistency of themes and visual language through all these seemingly disparate projects; I am not one of those people.
Tuesday, April 12, 2022:
The mini-thesis and apologia projects stressed me out because it was daunting to choose one direction for my work and stick with it. As you might know, I am a dabbler, and not a commit-er. Since the last Monday (when the two projects were introduced to us), however, I have been able to force myself to pick a direction, and articulate why I chose that direction. It helped to understand that what I choose to make now does not have to define my work for the rest of my life; in fact my work is bound to change over time. My apologia essay is only an articulation of the work I want to make now.
In my apologia essay I wrote that I want to work on graphic narratives (comics + graphic novels) and I have started working on a short comic for my mini-thesis. The comic is about an upper-caste woman’s relationship with religion. It spans a day in her life, and tries to capture her sense of isolation as she completes household chores, and how religion is her only source of solace.
Attaching the sketches I made for some of the spreads below:
and a few pages later:
Ok more from me soon.
See you,
P