trisected

Tag: art

  • Creative Late Night Posting

    Man! Doing a daily post is really something I found difficult last time, and now, its still something I need to put some effort into to get it right. Almost missed today’s post and I had a lot of good thoughts that I wanted to place here but the day is almost over and I have forgotten quite a bit of it.

    I’ve been able to do creative things today – helped a friend out with a wall mural. It’s probably going to be finished in the next few days, but I don’t have any more slots to help her out with.

    Being able to do something creative isn’t the whole magical shebang that you would imagine. Or at least, I don’t think that’s what I glean from my creatives sessions. I see it as a time where my hands are working, and my mind is thinking. My hands are not really being controlled, other than to match what I’ve set out to do – like painting, drawing, calligraphy. My mind is wandering because I’m seeing the space in many different ways, and I don’t really need to think of how to interact with it. It just interacts.

    This “mindless interaction” is something that I really look forward to. My mind is usually at work, solving things, thinking and planning. But in my art, in my expression, it just goes. I don’t control, or at least I’ve learnt not to control. This gives me a lot more joy, as compared to previous experiences when I had a lot more of a controlled experience. Not to say that those controlled experiences weren’t wrong, but just to address my own current creative space that I look forward to.

    I don’t need it to be defined, and I feel like defining these moments would spoil the fun of it. So I just do whatever creative pursuits pop up, and the aimlessness of it makes it interesting.

    Then the planning side of me comes up, and I get very annoyed with myself. But to be smart, I shall save that story for tomorrow: How I combat my creative brain.

  • Momentum

    What do you do on the days when you don’t feel like doing any work?

    It’s not that we’ve been lazy (yes, I dragged you into this), but maybe we’ve just done enough. There’s no more need to do any more.

    The cool weather, with a nice touch of sun to light up the home, and thoughts of lazing in bed before the galore of responsibilities crash like a delivery driver on an electric scooter. Just smacking your straight on, with loud euro trash electro, and flashing lights. Saw it a mile away, and yet, we tried our best to savor the peace and quiet of the moment as long as we could.

    An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

    Newton’s First Law of Physics

    Was Newton not describing me today, sitting on my chair, lazing in my sofa, lying in bed, napping away?

    Life is really when science and art meet.

    End note: so much for the progress that I was working on for the past few days. The irony of it is that I’m still maintaining that sense of work, just that I don’t want to do it.

  • Waves of Life

    There’s times when I’m really quite disciplined to get things done consistently through the day or week. And there are times when I just don’t feel like doing anything for another range of time. I think I mask this quite well by being competent at most things, but otherwise, it’s actually really quite a bummer.

    I wish that I was able to keep on at things all the time. The inner Jocko Willink in me says “Just do, don’t think.“ That works out, sometimes. Actually it works out a lot more often than I would like to admit. It’s just a pain to be an asshole to yourself, as you do the work that you need to do, day after day. There are definitely times when you want to just take a break and call it a day. Or just to have an off day. Jocko’s premise is that the enemy might always strike, but honestly I don’t have an enemy that I need to strike at this time.

    Another part of me lies with the Artist’s and their impulsive driven creativity. I don’t necessarily agree with this, but I agree with the expressions in the Artist Way. Julia Cameron says “Don’t be too hard on yourself, and just accept all the work you produce.“ That works out for me, but there are days when I really don’t like the work that I do either. I just don’t want to do work, I just want to lie down and look at the world passing me by

    I guess it would be wise to observe that a part of me now really enjoys that. I have learnt from Clarice some of the arts of lying down to just pause and not do anything. It is incredibly difficult for me, but I am trying to develop space for myself to just observe the world around me. It’s weird because there’s always the do, do, do. But there’s an aspect of doing that’s just to sit there and stop, and pause, and appreciate the moment.

    I’m thinking about painting again, but I’m honestly scared. Scared that I can’t make sense of my drawings, or that the liberal part of me would accept any nonsense I produce. In that fear, I run to keyboards again, I run to YouTube and Netflix and Disneyplus. I just haven’t dared to paint. But I know I need to, I just need to get it done.

    I’ll aim to do it this weekend, but God help me. I really need some deep internal motivation, that really hasn’t been around for the longest time.

  • The beauty that the Artists draws from 

    How do you get inspiration, and how does this propel you to do better work? 

    — — —

    Wow so I wrote this post in 2017, July. I can’t remember what exactly I was aiming for, but this gist is something that I find so hard even now to think about. I mean like, how does one get inspiration? That is a fine and hard question.

    I’m not sure how much of this makes sense, but I think each day has it’s moments. I’ve learnt how to be a lot more forgiving on myself, if I can’t produce something that I had hoped to initially. There’s really no forcing it.

    I think it’s a range of learning as well. What am I looking for in the motivation, in the inspiration? I think when I first thought of this draft 5 years ago, I was probably being a lot more direct and immediate into art itself. But from how things are going now, and how things will continue to go: I think daily life needs motivations too.

    I haven’t touched my art materials for a very long time. I don’t know if I can do much, or if anything at all. I’ll have to dust off a lot of mental inertia to get started again. Is there beauty? Yes. But the question now has become, what do I really need to capture? Is it worth me capturing? And somehow, the answer needs to be yes.

    What is beauty at the end of the day? What am I really thinking about when I think of how to draw from the beauty of this world? Why did I think such hard questions then???

    If i am asking myself that today, it goes back to how I see each day’s individual moments. There are a number of things that I’ve seen that are incredibly powerful everyday. It’s not easy, but it’s not difficult either. It needs me to stop, and to pause. I find trouble in doing that a lot of the time. The captured moments need a good time of reflecting on how things even got to where they are right now.

    Maybe I should revisit this in 5 years, and my answers would change by then. Like the Billie Eilish interviews, I might grow to find myself annoying. Perhaps.

  • Creative Dilemmas

    Creative Dilemmas

    24 hours in a day is too little. Yes, wildly known fact.

    But the hardest part I find is that my passion level in each interest grows or wanes everyday. For example, last week I really wanted to run. And I still kinda do.

    But today, I awoke and hey, there’s time for a run but I just didn’t feel like running. Instead I drew, and I was quite happy drawing. I watched videos, arranged and organized things, no running or exercise at all. And it was fine. Then I watched some skate videos and felt the same lack of interest.

    The funny thing is that maybe a month or more ago, it was the complete opposite. I was eating up anything skate related at all, and all my efforts were trying to get skateboarding as a priority. Sketching and watercoloring were just things to do so that I could skate around.

    So I really wonder, when and at what time will it stabilize itself? Will there always be a passion conflict for all interests? Or will it all work itself out together?

  • Abstraction

    1280
    Untitled (Red) 1958 – Taken from the NGV Website
    How does Rothko make a Rothko? I was reading this and really processing. Would I cry if I stood long enough at a Rothko piece? I remember I was almost tearing at NGV when I saw the Rothko piece there, but that was from the pure happiness of actually seeing a Rothko piece.

    Did the abstraction miss its point, in the intended emotional response?

    On a return trip, however, I actually avoided the Rothko, for fear of dealing with an intended response from the artwork. It was as if the piece was standing there, asking me to express or read an expression from it. “How do I make you feel today?” I evaded the question, and sped ahead to another exhibit.

    Now, considering my somewhat cowardly response toward an artwork, I come to that question: Can my artwork produce a response? Being trained in visual communication, I would think that crying because you saw my work would mean a few things. One would be horrible use of color or typography. Another could be a hidden memory, awakened from the past.

    I ask this, perhaps because, I am rarely moved by art these days. My girlfriend would point this out to me clearly, as I speed through galleries, gathering as deep an impression of 20 seconds at most. I blame neither the quality of artwork, nor the artist’ in his or her thoughts, but that challenging question: “How do I make you feel today?”

    Would a Christian respond to art differently? During a local exhibition, I saw the scene of Christian and Jesuit martyrs in Japan. This gave me great thought, and I did pause for a lot longer than 20 seconds. The country I admired, sacrificing people of my religious beliefs and truths, for doing the very things that I do as my work. Would I be one of them?

    “How do I make you feel today?” Scared, terrified in fact.

    But I digress. This abstraction, the emotions felt without a clear imagery or reference. Just colors, textures, applied over surfaces. Emotions were poured into it, and yet, there is no obligation for the viewer to emote in response. Is that process of art abstract in itself?

    Despite all my ramblings and thought, I guess at the end of the day, my question in my artwork would be: “Could you feel anything today?” and if you do, then I hope I was not to blame for it. Artistic abstract expression, you’re not the one at fault. It was probably me.