more about art

Perhaps God was trying to tell me something then, and now.

Recently, I have been showing my art to others. It appears as though these people are more educated and more interested in art than most of the others from my past. They have been asking me “what it means.” Not even at college was I ask this, well, not much anyway. We talked about techniques and improvements we had made and progress from beginning to end of the piece. Until Lu, I never had a second thought about my subject matter, only that I did not want to do the same stuff as everyone else. I did not want to paint horses and cowboys. There is just way too much of that here and I do not like cowboys anyway. I route for the Native Americans. All I was really doing was expressing the images in my head, nothing more. When I went back to college and earned my BA in psychology, I learned some new information on subject matter in art. There is a part of psychology called “art therapy.” The original intent was to help Vietnam veteran/ PTSD victims to express their emotions when they could not do so verbally. It was highly successful and produced some magnificent art. There are numerous studies that show a direct link to those who have emotional issues to artistic abilities. It is also used to help identify abuse victims in children. The children are asked to draw themselves and their families. Other than the obvious, the psychologist looks for things like missing body parts. There are formulas that they use to make determinations. A few years back, I did a portrait of a woman and noticed after I thought that I was done that her nostrils were disproportionally small. So, does this mean I am feeling like I can not breath? I am feeling oppressed? Who is oppressing me? Do I hate women and wish that they can not breath? Is that a statement of my past relationships with women? I just forgot about it. But we can not forget good old Freud, can we? What am I repressing? Do I hate my mother? I had a very good literature teacher in college who taught us about analogizing vs. anal-izing. Anal-ize being putting far too much person inferences on the author’s work and making ridiculous assumptions about the piece. I just forgot. I have not put much thought into the meaning of my art. I was only trying to express the images in my head and hopefully to get an emotional reaction from someone. So, I guess I should feel complimented that I got such a huge reaction. Perhaps I should do some growing and be more cognizant of what I am trying to say and not just focus on the creating process. Maybe I will find that I do not have anything to say, then maybe I will just not show anybody my work.

This morning I was trying to remember why I was attempting to repaint that painting. It took me a long time to recall. In college, we seldom talked to each other about what our stuff meant. We spent lots of time talking about our progress and growth and the whole process from beginning to end. We would have an exhibition at the end of the semester. Their was a little studio at the end of the art wing that we displayed our work. Each student picked out their best pieces. We only had enough room for one or two each. Our finals class was us gathering in the studio and talking about our work. So, we would have to have nice frames and yadda yadda because it counted toward our grade. That painting was there. Funny, no one asked me why the lion was eating the lady and why I was satanic and why I put all of the blood in it and where was my cape. My instructor said he did not like grades and wished he did not have to do so. Therefore, he graded us on our efforts, showing up to class, participating, but not on subject matter or content. In fact, the one time I did paint a western type scenery( every one raved about it and I sold it for $300), he said it would be the best piece in the show but it was too “typical.” I took it as him trying to tell me not to sell out. Anyway, we had a substitute for a few weeks while I was working on my lady and the tiger. This guy taught the evening art classes and it was very good because he offered us all a different perspective from our other regular teacher. He pointed out that my work was chromatic, meaning it lacked in color variety. He ask me for a suggestion, so I thought of using some red. He and the others agreed. So, I added some in and thus Satan was reborn. The red made it a much more interesting and vibrant painting. Ok, so I remember now that I was repainting it to remove the red. Now, when I have the time, I will finish what I started, only the red is going back and so will be some blue.