Thursday, September 04, 2003
My Monday/Wednesday classes are going to be rather exhausting. Eight hours of studio time in one day is a lot, and art is a messy business, so I come home feeling tired and grimy. Good classes, though -- I'm glad for that. As for today's course offerings, I'm really beginning to enjoy my American Renaissance class, believe it or not; it involves a lot of great round table discussion and has spawned many seeds of ideas for essay topics, one of which will hopefully come to a rewarding fruition in a fortnight or so when my paper's due. My linguistics class gets more and more interesting, and my intermediate painting class was better today, too -- though I'm not quite ready to give my professor much more merit. We'll see how that goes as the semester progresses.
I've noticed recently that for the first time in my life I consider myself an artist rather than an art student. Obviously there are still things for me to learn -- else I wouldn't be in school -- but there has been a definite shift in how I regard myself. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that I'm slowly building a body of work that I enjoy and that shows growth in style, technique, and ideas. I think my summer in Italy also influenced this change in mentality; there is something to be said about physically experiencing masterpieces of architecture and art. Walking on marble mosaics, touching ancient columns, viewing grand facades, inspecting Raphael's brushstrokes: to do these things is to become fully aware of the reality of those works. They are even more awesome when seen with your own eyes, but simultaneously you notice the nuances and the flaws which remind you that these glorious things are men's creations. Somehow it makes you more inspired and confident in your own creativity.
Interestingly, while I have read quite a few great works of literature, I don't have an especial confidence in my literary creativity. It is curious how my views toward art and writing differ and interact. With art, I can paint a still life of fruit, or a landscape -- and though there have been myriad still lives and landscapes created through the ages, I feel that mine are unique, and as such will possess their own sparks of life and interest through my use and manipulation of the materials. Literary creativity, for me, is a more difficult talent to discover. It's no secret that Alec initially conceived of a good deal of the ideas for our stories; I acted more as a developer, moulding those ideas, subtracting from and adding to them in order to form the plot. I think I'm good at this -- but I feel quite inadequate when it comes to generating original ideas from scratch.
But really, ideas aren't original: they're just old concepts and borrowed notions applied in a new way. While I can control and manipulate paint and color and composition on a canvas, in writing I have difficulty transmuting familiar ideas into something different and building on that. Everything that I have authored on my own has been short, probably for this reason. But I wonder how much of this is due to my own inability, or my lack of experience and knowledge. When it comes down to it, I'm not nearly as well-read or learned as I'd like to believe. Perhaps Alec's gift with ideas stems from the fact that he has much familiarity with vast amounts of literature and history and can easily draw on that store of knowledge.
In any case, I think it's interesting that I feel more successful in my artistic pursuits, and less successful in my literary ones (not to imply that I'm not proud of what I've written, because I am, very) -- yet I've considered myself a writer for a longer period than I've considered myself an artist. Funny, that.
On a slightly digressive note, today was Alec's birthday, and I wrote a short ficlet as a gift. It won't be archived anywhere yet; however, I'll be posting it for those of you who might be interested, once Alec has made all his commentary. Editorial rights are part of the gift when you're presenting birthday prose to your co-author. ;)
| 7:03 PM |
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Who am I? I'm a twenty-two-
