Sometimes in the way we as humans get into patterns we lose parts of ourselves, usually in the way of spontaineous behavior and artistic expression (or for the non-gifted, artistic apprechiation). For the bigest part of my life I have been very patterned in things I did, I basicly didn’t do much and anything I did do was under my parents’ careful supervision and control. Now that I am an adult (did I just say the A word in reference to myself?) and am mostly free of parental dictatorship I find it hard adapting to the world around me, especially when I am expected to make any type of decision (unless control is clearly granted to me I don’t make many decisions). In the past few weeks I have decided that I have become too systematic and too drone-like in my interpreation of the life experience. An attempt to correct this was made with my decision to change my living space’s look a little. In August I changed my room around from the way it had been for years, but this was not enough of a change for my personality to show through. In December I decided that I loved the fresco by Raphael called “The School of Athens”, so a reprint of it scaled to 4:25 scale (the original is 303 inches wide) would be appropriate. Having this 4ft wide image is interesting and in some ways inspiring. The painting is the ultimate documentation of the personality and role of a lot of philosophers from the origins of philosophy (as all characters expand from either Plato or Aristotle). Now by encouragement from Chris, as well as Oscar (new friend in Texas) is leading to me deciding to put a statue of Michaelangelo’s David somewhere in my living space. There was a time in my life when I would have never thought of decorating this way, I used to have no apprechiation for good art, but through some maturing as well as some academic reinforcement I seem to be doing better at understanding art and finding it to be more than just paint on a canvas or a structure of clay. I mention the academic reinforcement some of you probably turn your heads and think “ok, he has been trained to love art”, but thats not the case at all. Carol Whitman‘s Art Apprechiation course during Summer 2004 was a very informative course, but didn’t force a love of art, just opened the door and introduced some methods for analysis of art. It is possible to analyze art too much, but if it has no meaning and is just “pretty”, then it has lost its point. There are some pieces that shouldn’t be explained though, such as a huge painting of a mountain or body of water, it is self-explanityory, but there should be internal feelings of being peacefully overwhelmed by the piece.
A form of art that I didn’t really acknowledge much at all was music, I used to just listen to music, without really hearing it, it was a background noise for me. Being around Chris changed that a lot in the past two years. There was a post I made a few months ago called “Assorted Weirdness“, which has no relevancy to anything, but is the first time I think I really started to experience music fully without it just being a background noise. It had a meaning and I had a reason to listen to it, the song I was listening to at the time had relevancy to the topic.
To make a relatively complex entry simple, I am begining to function as an individual who expressed personality by art creation (ceramics) as well as by art apprechiation. I feel that I am discovering my personality for once.