More than Listening

Have you ever had a song come on that carried so many memories with it you thought your heart would rise out of your chest?
It may sound like an insane idea, but there are some songs out there that carry so much meaning for me that I am automatically transported to a certain place and time whenever they come on. This is especially true for songs sung at campfires where I work in the summer. The counselors of the camp spend all year searching for meaningful songs to be used over a 3 month period in the summer when we are all together.
The song that first got me thinking about this idea is "Swing Life Away" by Rise Against, which my friends and I sang at summer camp this past year.
This idea, along with a prompt for a school project is how this next piece came to be.

This piece was created using colored pencils on normal sketchbook paper and was inspired by the song "Push to Freeze" by Sorcerer. The song has no lyrics, but the music itself was enough to inspire this.

The way in which it was created, was the most fun for me personally. While listening to the song on my Ipod, I started absentmindedly drumming on the paper with my colored pencils. Eventually I realized that what I was doing could be an interesting way to create art, which is how my play evolved into art.

Straying from Reality

      I have always wondered how peoples minds differed from each other. Obviously I will never know for sure, because i can't get into someone elses head, and people are inherent liars.
Below is a small doorway into my imagination, courtesy of my sketchbook.

      I think the closest to truly being able to understand a person comes from seeing their drawings as a child, before they either lose their interest in art, or are too embarassed to go with their gut feeling. In my mind this is also why some really great art is child-like. Good artists can remake a picture with impecable accuracy, great artists aren't afraid to go back to basics. Great artists aren't chained to the restraints of the material world, they make art that lives within its own.

      Take for example the art of Christo and Jeanne Claude (http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/index.shtml). Christo is known for draping enormous monuments in spools of decadent fabrics. From all angles his pieces are seen from, they offer a feel of impossibility and fantasy. Many of his pieces have been controversial but with his wife, Jeanne Claude by his side, he has faced every obstacle.

      Another example of this fantasy art that I appreciate is that of Shel Silverstein (Official Silverstein Site). The children's author and lyricist illustrates all his own books with fantastic creatures seemingly straight out of  a dream. He is completely unafraid to put the creatures in his head onto paper; a quality that I genuinely admire. 

      I know that both of these artists have their faults. Since the recent death of his wife, Christo has begun planning a new piece, draping many miles of a river in cloth, potentially damaging the surrounding ecosystem permanently. Obviously he has had trouble drumming up support for such a dangerous task, and is still working on the permits. Shel Silverstein has been accused of having a very disturbing criminal past. Even with their problems, both of these men are critically thinking, imaginative geniuses and in my opinion, some of the best artistic minds of our time.

Natural American Spirit

            This piece, entitled “Natural American Spirit,” is a two foot by two foot square pine plank, spray painted and covered with about 500 cigarette butts (Disgusting I know, but I of course used gloves every time I handled them). It was inspired by the artist Andy Goldsworthy; a man known for taking found objects from nature, and creating fantastic pieces out of the ordinary.

         Mr. Goldsworthy’s esthetic of using found objects drove me to search for things along the ground that I may use in an artistic manner, as Goldsworthy does. What I found, however, was that my college campus did not have an abundance of natural resources like the Scottish countryside from which Goldsworthy creates his best work. Instead I noticed that the grounds of the campus were littered with trash, particularly with hundreds of cigarette butts. Not only that, but the squirrels around campus eat the cigarettes, which one can definitely assume is not good for the environment. It became my personal goal to make something beautiful out of the ugly that I found, and as an added bonus, I was cleaning up campus as well.

Just a disclaimer, I don't smoke, and therefore none of these are originally mine... which may be better or worse than if they were depending on how you think about it.

Below are a set of failed attempts at ideas using the cigarette butts:

Not wanting to be too contrived or literal, I discarded the other ideas and eventually came up with my final composition. After eight hours of glue and shellac this is the finished product:

Creative Thought Matters

Hello and welcome to my blog! I'm well aware that most people who will read this blog will either feel obligated to because they know me, or come across it because they got to this website by accident but for whatever reason you're reading this, I appreciate it.

I am currently an art student in my second year of college. I realize that fact will make some people think I'm an existentialist bigot who smokes a lot of cigarettes and thinks way too highly of themselves, but I generally like to think otherwise.

I would like the point of this blog simply to be to get my artwork into the world and impact whomever feels at all compelled by what I do. I'm not planning on becoming the next Van Gogh or Edgar Degas (who is my favorite artist by the way), but I would like in some way to speak to the art world, and hopefully have the art world speak back.

Thanks for reading!
KC