Overshadowed by luck

Like many people, art was something I did as long as I could remember. I even dreamed of being a comic artist at one point which looking back is quite fitting considering where my interests have gone. Unfortunately, I never went out of my way to learn the fundamentals of art ( line weight, composition, perspective etc..). Hell, I didn't even know they really existed until a few years ago. Because of this, I constantly experience this nagging feeling of playing catch up with other people. I had given up art during High School but on a whim, I took an art class just for fun at my community college a few years back. Long story short, art gave me direction that I was clearly lacking at that point. The art class I took emphasized creativity and experimentation. At the time, this was very liberating and kind of eased my way back into art. The flip side to this is that the fundamental elements were de-emphasized in the process. This clearly shows in a lot of my earlier work. The best of piece of work that came out of this period was this.....

 
Despite the work I had created in the following years, this particular piece is what most people reacted to most strongly. At first it was nice having something that people enjoyed but now its become quite burdensome. It is nice to have positive reactions to my work but I have completed much stronger pieces since then. A couple months ago, my girlfriend and I took a closer look to this piece and came to the the conclusion to why people react so strongly to this piece....

I got lucky!



Upon closer examination, there were things going on in this piece that I didn't even realize. The multiple layers gave it a sense of depth, the use of text, the bold graphic of the girl, the use of red were just a few things that helped this piece stand out. None of these things were intentional because quite frankly, I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I tired replicating similar pieces with style with no real success as a result. On the other hand, I do feel this piece did contain a certain amount of spontaneity that is lacking from my current work which I think mainly had to do with the mixed media aspect. I decided soon after I completed this piece to strictly concentrate on the fundamental elements of art. Three years later, I finally feel like I reached a point where I can successfully explore mixed media more thoroughly. Whether this results in good art is another story.

First post

I think the title says it all. This will be my first real attempt at maintaining a blog (that crappy Myspace one doesn't count). This blog will focus on the development of my art as continue my studies in pursuing a degree and career in art. I've been holding off on starting a blog mainly for the fact that I really didn't have any work to really show off as my own. What I mean by this was that most of my work contained in my portfolio was strictly academic work(still-life s, life drawings, color studies etc..). These things display my technique (or lack thereof) but don't really say much about me personally. I told myself that I would start a blog when I finally got to a point where I was turning out work that truly represented me as an artist. A couple of weeks ago I feel like I reached this point when I was given free reign on my final illustration project last semester. Because of the freedom, I created two pieces based on a graphic novel which I may or may not make(I'll post the actual pieces in the next post). Another more obvious reason was that I never felt my work work was worth showing off. To some degree I still feel like this is true but honestly this feeling will never go away. By not showing my work, I'm missing out on an opportunity to receive feedback from a variety of sources and track my progress as well. Starting now, I'm going to attempt to update this blog as much as possible. Both good and bad (probably a lot of that actually) but the feedback I receive will only make me a better artist in the long run. so here's to the first of hopefully many posts in future. To end my first post, here's a photo from a series I did in my photography class last year. It seems rather fitting in a way.

Steven