unlithour - Tumblr blog

unlithour · 3 months

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On Finding Oneself

It seems to me that finding oneself usually requires some sort of journey. I wish more than anything that I could push through the coats of an overstuffed wardrobe and step into Narnia. Fall through the looking glass and embark on a mad adventure.

Or maybe find a wrinkle in time, a way to return and repair my past mistakes; to pass hard earned wisdom on to my younger self. But in truth I'm in my mid thirties and on a budget. So here I am with only a lantern searching in this unlit hour.

Sipping my Blanchard's Dark As Dark blend with the Gallow Dance playing quietly in the background, I sit with the acknowledgment that I will not step through some magic portal. Probably won't even take a trip to Norway to lay in the crisp snow beneath the Aurora Borealis, which would also more than suffice.

I google "how to find yourself" and the results are frankly disappointing. I'm too jaded for positive thinking, too cynical for manifestation, and too cranky for affirmations. I'm reminded of the meditation penguin from Fight Club. *Slide!*

While any sort of grand adventure may be off the table for now, recreating a similar environment to a time in which I was enamored with the world may be a possible step in the right direction. This tiny hope, is in part responsible for my return to Tumblr and to writing. To me they are both relics of 2008, and symbolic of better days.

So I start this low budget quest to rediscover myself by creating a simple list of things I was once inspired by and enjoyed.

Activities:

Hanging out at book shops & cafes

Reading

Writing

Drawing, painting, & mixed media

Listening to new albums

Watching Criterion & Art House films + new movies in general

Playing PS1 games and board games

Visiting galleries, local artist co-ops, & museums

Solo camping

Day trips to other towns, national parks, & scenic destinations

Browsing art supplies at my local art store

Urban walk-abouts at night

Photography for fun

Dressing up for no reason

Live concerts

Researching & studying artists I loved

Paint your own pottery places

Y/A Books:

Mandy / The Last of The Really Great Whangdoodles

The Secret Garden / A Little Princess

The Chronicles of Narnia

The Harry Potter Series

A Wrinkle In Time Series

The NeverEnding Story

His Dark Materials Series

The Newford Charles De Lint Series

The Princess Bride

The Dark is Rising Series

Anything by Roald Dahl

The Light Princess

Wind in the Willows

The Hobbit & LOTR

The Historian

The Shadow of The Wind

Perault's & Grimm's Fairytales

Gothic / Atmospheric Literature:

Wuthering Heights

Picture of Dorian Gray

Dracula

Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe

Music:

Heavy metal, melodic metal, & doom/sludge metal

Dark wave, cold wave, & gothic rock

90's grunge, alt rock, & trip hop

80's synth wave

Artists:

Edward Gorey

Rene Margritte

Aubrey Beardsley

Erté

Marjorie Miller

Claude Monet

Elias van den Broeck

Dorothea Tanner

Edward Hopper

Mark Ryden

Artemisia Gentileschi

Botticelli

DaVinci

Michelangelo

Movies:

Waking Life

Fight Club

Vengeance Trilogy

Spirited Away

Style Wars

Any Art21 Documentary

Edward Scissorhands

Cry Baby

Labyrinth

American Beauty

Train Hopping

Heavy Metal

Dead Poets Society

A Scanner Darkly

Kill Bill Volumes

Any classic Disney animated film (except for the sad ones like Bambi)

Do you have any reading or watching suggestions based on this list? I'd love to hear them.

#spilled ink #artists on tumblr #small artist #dear diary #journal entry #diary entry #finding yourself #depresso #reading list

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unlithour · 3 months

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On Becoming Jaded

It's a funny thing, to wake up one day and realize that you are jaded. To wonder where it all went wrong. To suddenly feel fond of a urinal.

Then, I couldn't get enough art in my life. I was attending art university as a full time painting student, visiting galleries and museums, watching art house films, and haunting the art book aisle at Barnes & Noble.

Most importantly, I was making so much art that I didn't know what to do with it all. Hardly any of it was good, but it existed.

I watched as other students graduated only to get jobs as baristas and bartenders. So I moved from the East coast to the West coast and pursued a career as a tattooist. It took me about 8 years and a failed brick & mortar business to realize that was not my path.

That failure stopped me in my tracks. After that I half-heartedly attempted to start a small business consulting firm, which I also shut down. Somewhere along the way I lost myself and my self confidence in my art. I became jaded and began to languish in my regrets.

Now, it has been 9 years since I created a single piece of art.

Lying awake at night trying to puzzle out the origin of all this has not wrought any great epiphanies. I wonder if it was the traditional approach of my professors; the insistence that there was no place for illustrative or "low brow" style in the world of fine art. Or the curriculum-mandated "critiques" where my peers sat around my art in a semicircle and told me the ways in which I was insufficient. The gallery and the grant rejections. The incessant gatekeeping. The idea that the only way to become a truly phenomenal artist was to pick a thing and to do it over and over and over.

I actually had a professor that only painted brick walls. Literally, he spent years making paintings of brick walls. Were they the most realistic and beautifully textured bricks ever painted? Yes, they were. But the idea of committing so deeply to one thing horrified me. It still does. I imagined myself sitting in some sad studio apartment for decades perfecting my craft with my only hope for success being of the post-mortem type.

This is why, in traditional art schools, they harp on about the importance of archival materials. Preservation for posterity and what not. Because genuine greatness is ahead of its time and can take generations to be truly seen.

What originally drew me into art was Impressionism. The way Naples yellow could make clouds hanging over a sunset glow. The dashing of paintbrushes across a canvas which most mysteriously formed images. So, I was rather full of youthful disdain when I was exposed to modern art. If Andy Warhol painting cans of soup wasn't lazy enough, imagine my shock when I saw Duchamp's porcelain urinal on exhibit at the Tate Modern. I'd been drinking the kool-aid of artistic elitism and snidely thought to myself, " This is why modern art is not art."

Years later I read about photographer Alfred Stieglitz who wrote a rave review about the toilet saying, "The "Urinal" photograph is really quite a wonder—Everyone who has seen it thinks it beautiful—And it's true—it is. It has an oriental look about it—a cross between a Buddha and a Veiled Woman."

Despite Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" originally being suppressed by galleries and receiving a number of scathing reviews, it still made it into the annals of art history.

These days Duchamp's urinal makes me smile on the inside, and I'm quite fond of it. There's no evidence to support this, but I like to think that it was his way of thumbing his nose at some dusty professor who told him he'd never make it.

From where I stand now, I feel a sort of camaraderie with the Dada and Fluxus artists. An understanding of the indeterminacy of art. A desire for anti-art. Maybe they too were disillusioned and jaded.

A fellow netizen wrote, "Becoming jaded is about trust. You became jaded when you discovered the world was not the place you trusted it to be." In that vein, I think I trusted that art gave my life meaning and without that I have no direction. I allowed my self perceived failures as an artist to deprive me of meaning and purpose.

I need to find my inspiration again. It may just lay hidden somewhere between Buddha and a veiled lady, behind an ordinary toilet.

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