Expressionism & Thoughts on Art

Expressionist art brings a connection to the spiritual world. I think that it gives credit to emotions for being the purest indicators of the soul. Emotions are real and out of our control. We can change what we know, but we can't change how we feel. The expressionist pieces we saw today don't attempt to mimic reality too closely. This makes perfect sense because reality is unsure. I do not see the same reality as the person next to me. Expressionism seems to see emotions, not reality, as our connection to each other and to art. I remember doing a STACapedia article on Munch. His paintings had an obvious emotional quality. You know exactly how it feels. The film with the man with the balloons, the operas, and the Bunto dancing each seemed to have a uniform emotional quality, as if they were projections of a single emotion.

Thinking about expressionism today brought me closer to a definition of art. I've heard that art is the language of the soul, and I believe it makes more sense to me right now than to many of the people who have said it. As a writer, language is a huge interest of mine, and I understand that language rises from necessity. The better humans communicate, the more efficient we are and the faster we have advanced. But we all have an inner world that we can never communicate with near close to perfect accuracy.
We talk about this in acting. When I see you, I don't see you how you see yourself. I see what I feel and what I know about you. But how much can I know? I was thinking- how much others know about me, THAT is how accurately I look at other people. I don't think others know anything about me, and I don't think anyone knows much about anyone. Art is like when a group of teenagers sits around and admits to each other the weird things they do when they're alone, and they feel their actions are validated. But the language we speak only gets us so far. I cannot explain to another person what my world looks like or what I look like to myself. But when they see my art, they are seeing it. The validation is in the fact that they can find some meaning in it. That is where our inner worlds connect. It is unspoken, and it is beautiful, and that is why art is important.

I'm not saying laziness wasn't a factor in my lack of blogging the past few weeks, but several times I've considered it and then stopped because all I want to talk about is relationship problems. Life's really hard!
Anyway, I thought my group's Be Kind Rewind was a big success. The function of the activity certainly has evolved since my sophomore year. The first year we did them, they were all really funny and pretty well done. The past two years, they've been less well done and funny in a different way. This is okay! The past two years, I've gotten a lot out of the projects. My group's movie didn't get a lot of laughs; we ended up coming up with something pretty dark and serious. What's good is it took us only three days in Stac to come up with a pretty solid idea for a movie! Had I just sat around thinking of a movie to make, I might never get an idea so solid. Also, after making a little sketch of the movie, we were already forced to work out some holes. Snow White Trash started out as a Be Kind Rewind, and I think this movie is going to be a good one once we make it!

I'm at one of those crossroad times of my life. I'm starting to feel all the fallbacks of being young. I never thought I'd want to grow up, but fall can't come soon enough, and winter is just as welcome. I started senior year feeling too old to still be here. It's the classic teenage syndrome; we're all trying to grow up too fast. Adults criticize us for it, but I figure if we're all doing it, it can't be all wrong. My boyfriend broke up with me after he left for college. I guess that's adding a lot of fuel to my fire. My mom is hesitant for me to get my driver's license. I understand my curfew, but I don't understand my curfew. A year before I go away to college, I better be able to take care of myself. But if I'm able to take care of myself, why do I have so many people I have to answer to? Again, I get it, but I don't. I'm having a hard time being happy right now. I'll never write somebody off for being dramatic about a breakup. It is quite a fair reason to be upset. One good thing about not being happy is everything is at least a little exciting and different for a while. For example, I've been talking to myself a little more often, and I haven't really done that in a while. I'm even saying all these words as I type them while I listen to some sad music and it's making me feel a little better. We should all learn to be comforted by our own voices because they won't go away, and they are pretty powerful. They remind us that we can create something outside of ourselves, sound, and we can make somebody hear us, which isn't as good as making somebody listen but it's better than not being heard at all. I've also had to be a little more conscious lately because I'm trying to keep some things off of my mind, and I can't do it without putting in some effort. Things I used to dread are now little blessings, like having a lot of homework so that I can distract myself as long as possible. I also get to look at things from a different point of view. The point of view of somebody who is heartbroken turns out to be very different from the point of view of somebody who is really happy and in love, go figure. So nothing is really old anymore, everything is kind of new. Everything evokes different thoughts and feelings than before. I don't like looking at happy couples anymore. You'd be surprised how many there are on TV; I thought that sitcoms focused a little more on the arguments in marriages and relationships. As it turns out, there's a whole lot of happy in there! I hope I can remember that when I start wanting to see happy couples on TV again! They're all over town too, and all around the school.
So I guess the reason people make art when they're sad is because they're seeing everything in a new light, and all of a sudden there are a million things to say and nothing to do but say them.
I'm supposed to be figuring out where I'm going to apply to college now; I don't really know what to do with that. It seems like a big game to me, and I can't really take it seriously. In my Psych class the other day, Mr. McManus had a fake homework quiz in which he gave the directions, "On pages 25, there was a diagram. Try to replicate that diagram on your paper to the best of your ability." The point was, of course, that no one knew it, and after we all talked about how we felt about it. That's how I feel when confronted with this college thing. Are you really asking me to apply to a bunch of futures and then pick one? And do it all over the computer? Right here in my little swivel chair where I'm writing this blog post? It's hard to take it seriously. Something's telling me there's nothing more worthwhile to me right now than listening to jazz and browsing the internet.
I'm not just a thing with tasks, I'm a person, and I know what's best for me, and getting everything done exactly when I'm told to is not always the most important thing. I'm not giving up; I'm still motivated. I'm just trying to relax and make life a little easier. I feel alright right now.

The Perfect Circle!

Doing the mural today, I became aware of whatever fearlessness I've gained since my first year in Stac. I was quick and certain and never once wanted to erase! I even really enjoyed doing it. I actually came to some unexpected endings. I was never one to look back at a free writing exercise and come across things I forgot about writing, but that's what it felt like today. I learned that I connect love to hope to religion and somehow to perfection! Yes, what we did today actually helped me figure out what may be at the core of everything on my mind right now. I'm a perfectionist! I see the world as too complicated for me to handle. I don't modify the world to make it perfect, I modify my mind to believe it already is. On a bigger scale, I'm wondering if we all live in our perfects worlds. Can we survive knowing that the world isn't perfect? Is perfection not the impossible thing, but the only thing?
I'm figuring this out as I go along, and the answer is yes! We are all perfect in our own world. We can't help it. Everything I do changes my world just as everything my world does changes me. This goes on in a perfect circle.

And so begins my last year in Stac. It's a stranger feeling than I thought being a senior. I'm half wondering what I'm still doing here, a quarter grateful everything hasn't changed just yet, and a whole lot of a jumbled up mixture of everything that I know would connect if I just took so time to think about it.
I'm at a weird point in my life. I haven't accomplished much over the summer aside from being okay with not accomplishing anything (which for me is an accomplishment). I have this weird new confidence where I'm pretty sure I'm a genius but I don't want to get my hopes up. I think I'm getting something about life that I didn't always get. I have a new philosophy that I haven't quite located yet, a kind of determinism that is not in conflict with free will. I've begun to look at things as though everything is as it should be and nothing can be otherwise. We make decisions, but we could not have decided otherwise because we decide based on who we are and what we've experienced and everything in our lives that has led up to that decision. It's making me a little more alright with the world. It's making me start to love the world.
It's helping the way I look at art. Art requires an acceptance of the way the world is. Everything in the world could not be if it weren't for everything else. So art has to be everything at once. Every piece of art is the entire world, even if it's only addressing one aspect.
I stopped doing my daily practice. This was part of my new religion of acceptance. I had to accept that it was over. The idea of having one goal to begin with each quarter excites me immensely! Since my sophomore year, I've wanted to write and direct a play, and this year I'm going to do it. And I'm saying it so certainly so that if anyone catches me not doing it you can try to help me out by putting me back in line. It's that time of year when I feel that need to make art; I need to get it out of my system, out of my brain and somewhere I can see it.
I'm anxious for this year to be on its way. I hope to get to know all of you soon.

As for a daily practice, I want to read. Suggestions to start off with?

Workshop #2

Monday, we critiqued the work of those who had brought in work to be critiqued. Critiquing other people's writing is a thing I've always enjoyed; it was pointed out to me that I'm good at noticing flaws. I think I have a good ear for good writing. When it comes time to having my own work critiqued, it won't be quite as fun. I don't know why I get such joy in searching for flaws, but since it was addressed, I've noticed that it is a thing I tend to do. I don't think of myself as a negative person anymore. I think I look at the world in an extremely positive way for how realistically I approach it. I don't think I'm predisposed to look for flaws everywhere. I think I look for good things where I think I'm supposed to like it and bad things when I think I'm not. I've noticed lately that I have trouble forming my own opinions on things and filtering out other opinions I've heard of what is biased or up for debate. That sounds really bad. At the same time, I must be forming my own opinions on who is credible who's opinion is worth considering. Still, there was a time a little while ago when two of the people who's opinions I regarded perhaps higher than anyone's disagreed on a topic extremely relevant to me, and since then I've been struggling with this issue of who to listen to and who to trust. The way I've dealt with it is by trying to find uniform factors in both sides so I can try to make sense of it.

Workshop #1

The workshop today was a little slow. We didn't do any writing like I thought we would. Reed seems to have a very different approach to writing than I've seen. He emphasizes entertainment value over meaning. I always think that if the meaning part is nailed, entertainment will come along with it. He also lost me a little when he was talking about how every novel is a mystery novel and started to list novels that have murders in them. That didn't make too much sense to me. It started to make sense to me when he explained that all novels were mystery novels because they all answer the same four questions. Who am I? Why am I here? How did I get here? What does it mean?
His way of finding inspiration was interesting to me too. He uses newspaper stories. This was cool to me. We've learned a lot of ways to come up with ideas in STAC. He had the same attitude that writer's block or any kind of artist's block is just an excuse.
Today was a lot of basic stuff, but I'm really excited to get started with this first chapter assignment. I've never tried writing a novel before, so I'm excited to jump into it.