I am participating in #the100dayproject by completing paper collages and sharing on Instagram using the hashtag #100daysofpaperandpaste. My first post on this topic can be found here.
I'm in love. I love the process. I love the color and paper play. I'm ready to embrace the title "artist" again. In making and taking time to create art again, I feel more like myself.
This all sounds grand - and it is! - but it isn't coming super easily, either. Some days, yes. But many days, there is a real struggle before there is art. The struggle comes, in part, through the constraints of the project - both real and self imposed.
I feel constrained by the colors I can find in the resources at my disposal. In all of the magazines I've perused for color, pink, orange and yellow are hard to come by. And they are my faves. I can find little bits, but no full-page swaths of color like are readily available for black, grey and blue.
I feel constrained by the paper itself. I have this desire to be expressive with my strokes of color and this feels somewhat impossible with cut out paper. Perhaps I just haven't thought through this or played around with this enough.
I feel constrained by the color palette, style and overall "collection" that I've began. I realize this is silly. It's my project. I can take it any direction I please. Still, I feel pulled to make each piece fit in with the others.
Related to that, I would love to go through this first set of pieces hanging on my bedroom wall and pull out about 8 of them. Doing so would make me much happier with the overall look of the collection. For now, I'm resisting this temptation.
But all of this struggle gets back to the point of the project, right? Doing something for 100 days means that there will be days that I produce things I don't like and days that end with true gems. Doing something for 100 days means learning new things, slowly but surely.
I am tempted to turn this into a four phase project - each phase consisting of 25 days and creating its own collection. Doing so would help me to feel like there was room to take things in a new direction - new colors, new shapes, new themes - while sticking to the same medium.
Conversely, I am tempted to force myself to push through. I wonder if doing so would lead to "better" pieces as time passed.
For now, I'm undecided. And I have a couple days left to ponder. So, stay tuned for an update - or just follow along on Instagram to see if number 26 is drastically different from her predecessors.
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