Mid Pandemic Flailings

Artistically, I'm flailing.  Not sure how to create what I want to create or even if I should.

Art, to me, now, should be a reflection of one's self, one's existence.  Hold a mirror to life, reflect it and shine it out anew, distorted and abstracted as though through a prism.  And that is what I strive for.

To me an artist isn't someone who just makes pretty pictures.  An artist is a creative, a thinker, a philosopher.  Driven and pushed by urges and instincts that they cannot explain.  This is my life, this is what I leave behind, this is my statement.

Big words, big ideas.  In an academic sense, something to be crept up on, snuck up and approached over three years with an eye to creating a shown work at the end of the year and a culmination at the end of the third years of Work.  

I haven't created for a few weeks now.  I want to but something stops me.  There is fear.  Fear of going too far, of being told I am wrong.  There are...  valid grounds for feeling this.  It has happened before, before I endured so many lost years and now...?  My mind is bubbling, spilling over with ideas to persue, frustrated at being denied access to studios and materials due to this pandemic.

i am encouraged to not do photography

My work is moving towards a darker impulse.  I feel that to create the work that makes me feel like I am creating validly I must push in a direction that will not be embraced by the safe world of university.

Sex and drugs and rock and roll.  Hedonism and self destruction. Blood and sweat and art that is dangerous to the touch.  

But it's a big psychological push.  Breaking the hymen of social acceptance in my own mind before I even try and do it in other people, when I need, almost pathologically, acceptance.  I don't want to find myself ploughing a lonely furrough any more.  I don't think I can take rejection right now.

needlework

bloodywood

So where to now?  The summer stretches ahead, and I am confined to quarters for at least the next month of it. I hate not working, but I can't shake the paralysis.  Maybe after the results for the first uni year come in this week...  if they're good, maybe that will be validation enough?  Time will tell...