Dear Future AP Student,
The pieces that I love the most that I did this year are the ones I thought about the least. For some people, I think not thinking enough about the decisions of why you're making a certain piece of art a certain way is really debilitating to how much you let yourself really get into your work...at the same time, for me, I think Mark Twain's idea that great writing is allowing your conscious self to get out of the way of your unconscious self applies to how I need to do my art more.
I started my year with a very conceptual idea, the whole "what boxes us" that I tried too hard to translate with literal images. And I hated the try-hard-ness of them. Everything I did felt like an ending point instead of a starting one. So if anything, my advice to myself and to future AP students is not to get so worked up about the idea of your concentration. Karen Shea made hers about fish--but man how sick are fish, and how much meaning you can put behind them... Sophie did squished-up body parts, but for the viewer, you see so much more... One time over the summer at an art show this kid that was most likely under the influence came up to me and talked to me forever about the meaning he saw in this tree stump someone had painted. The artist had just painted a tree stump, and the viewer connected dots to things that were never intended--but just cause it's not intended, does that mean that meaning isn't there? I don't think so...and I figured out this year that it's better sometimes to just paint and figure out why you did what you did later on.
I don't think it's about how much you plan when you do it, but how much you care. I so wish that I hadn't had such an axe over my own head this year, and had just let myself go down one path, any path, and learn as I went without worrying about it. Even though I work well under pressure, it's super stressful, and now I'd love to expand more on the ideas I just started getting into. That said, I had the best time ever last night just doodling and adding color washes to my sketchbook, and I'm so excited to go out and do art and get better this summer. Love you all, thanks for putting up with my crazy :)
