Another year, and another set of interests for me. These should last for a while, though, as they come in a new phase in my life where I will be able to dedicate more time to them, and have chosen them more carefully after having tried them out last year. I am also enjoying them more in being happier in life than I have been in a long time, if not ever. Last year, I finally stopped the slow spiral into a black hole I had let myself and my life spiral into over the past handful of years, reversing course just before I hit the event horizon. I made some lifestyle adjustments, immersed myself into these and other interests, and am now back on track to being the best version of myself.
art
Definition: Art Amendment
Art Amendment
Art that modifies biased, misleading, and/or symbolically inappropriate art, rather than destroy or remove that art, so what that art wasn’t fair about isn’t forgotten like it was never done or might not happen again.
- There’s next to nothing online about this I was able to find in a quick Internet search.
Except that I know it came from the TEDTalk below by Titus Kaphar, and I LOVE the concept!
With more on how art changes us from the TEDRadio Hour podcast episode below…
But here’s what you do with this, think about how you’d amend art that is biased or misleading!
Of course, that’d require you to be aware enough to recognize what art needed amendment.
Then be creative for how you can amend it.
I’ll refrain from giving examples of art amendment only because it would be fully of judgmental controversy. I would have to pass judgment on what art I thought needed amending, and why. Then I’d have to give ideas of how I thought I could amend it, which people would judge to see if it would make the art any better. That’s after they’d judge my judgment on the art needing amending and my reason/s for it.
Now, I’m not shy about courting controversy, but I am strategic about it. A blog post where it’s hard to have a conversation about it isn’t my idea of such a venue. Put me in a crowd where I can have face to face dialogue? Then hell yeah! Bring it!
That’s not to suggest I’d be looking for a combative scene, hoping to win or something. No. That’s where I’d love to engage and see what becomes of it all, whether I’m right, wrong, or we all would come up with something better than any of us might have been able to come up with on our own. That’s my kind of courting controversy!
Learning to Paint, Millennial Style?
Recently, I took some steps to finally get “painting” off my bucket list of life skills to acquire. In March, I got a handful of Paint-Nite (now known as Yaymaker) coupons that must be used in 6 months, so I’d lose the $100 US if I didn’t use them, in other words. I also had a dozen or so online courses from the platform formerly known as Craftsy, before they were taken over by some other entity, on sale for about $10 each as “foundation theory”, when I had failed to actually take it up with the “doing” part. I was going to supplement the rest of what I’ll need to know with YouTube, online searches, networking with real painters, etc. All instead of spending almost twice as much for just one introductory post-secondary course (not including supplies) that would be the old-fashioned, or at least, traditional, way of learning! It would also be one that would get me far less knowledge and experience. Sure, it’d be less work on my part not to go do all this research, watch and read all this information, some of which isn’t the best, go find people to make friends with to be my “consultants”, etc. However, that just wouldn’t be me… or the innovating and resourceful millennial, for that matter… though I want to be absolutely clear I’m no millennial! You can always take the best of any group and incorporate it into your life to improve it, right?
Forward to the past few weeks and I finally got out to my first Paint Nite, where we painted a slightly challenging scene called Heron Pointe! The results are below. It’s plural because initially, I improvised for some fun to make a Death Star instead of a moon in my painting, when the instructor said something about how the wrong technique resulted in a blotch and “that’s no moon” (same quote by Obi-wan Kenobi from Star Wars). The Death Star looked terrible because the instructor taught us how to paint a moon, not a Death Star, and I’m no prodigy lol.
Upon seeing my output, and reconsidering it, I realized that to give this painting to anyone, whether my Parents or whoever may take it from in the laundry room where I may leave it as I run out of wall space with future paintings, there was going to be a seriously limited audience who might take the painting. As a result, after a recent Paint Nite where we learned to paint a moon (upcoming post), I fixed the Death Star in my painting to be the moon shown below. Flip through the collage to see the full painting. The moon’s not great, but it is far better than the Death Star, and someone might actually want to take this painting off my hand one day. 🙂
More of my painting adventures to come in the future!
Introducing Drawrigami, Combining Origami and Drawing for Art
This is a center spread for a sketchbook where I combined origami (Japanese paper folding) and drawing (to lay down water coloured pencils) into an art piece. I’m not really good at either origami or drawing, so I made the best of what I had to combine the two into something which’s total was greater than the sum of its parts. It also meets my mandate for origami considering “what will I bring to the game”, with the answer being a “replicable originality”, or new twists to traditional or common origami that others can try or create their own variations.
RETROPOP, WARHOL and BJORN Tennis Shorts
These are some fun pictures I recently got taken of me in some rather unconventional looking, and engineered tennis shorts I made almost a few years back, with posts writing about them linked in the headers except for the Warhol shorts, which are new to this blog.
Digital Citizen 