5
May
2009
Big Thinking
I’m on Spring break now and have been traveling around to Berlin, Paris, and currently London. There is so much good and appropriate music to listen to while walking up and down the Thames. The best I think has been The Kinks. I didn’t even know Waterloo was a place in London. Tommy by the Who was also pretty enjoyable. But every time I see London Bridge I get that song by Fergie in my head (oh shit!). It never fails.
I went to the Tate Modern today. A lot of times when I’m in museums, particularly when looking at 20th Century or contemporary work, what will happen is my mind will start running and I’ll start thinking about my life and/or what I want to do with my own work. I sometimes come up with really good ideas that I either forget or write down and never do anything with. I don’t know whether this is a good thing or not; either it means I’m too ADD to enjoy a museum or the work is so inspiring it just puts my mind in overdrive. I guess that’s a good thing. That’s what the work is supposed to do after all. But in doing that I probably don’t take in everything that’s there equally. I guess I’m getting that feeling lately because the places I’ve been to, particularly the Pompidou in Paris, have been full of so much great stuff that it’s really overwhelming to see all at once.
But today I managed to come up with a comprehensive idea that I’m actually going to execute, for real. I come back to Rome tomorrow and we have six weeks left in the semester, which are sans-art history and Italian classes. It’ll all be independent study studio work. Up until now it’s been very hard for me to focus. I spent a lot of time working on this site and doing other unrelated design projects instead of painting because it was just easier. It’s easier when you have a clear objective and constraints. What do you do when you’re free to do absolutely anything? How do you reconcile being immersed in one of the most important centers of Western culture and still trying to do work that is meaningful? I can’t help but put myself in that historical context, leading me to wonder what the point is in trying to do anything if it’s already been done and I’m not going to do it any better than they did the first time. “You gotta just do it,” my fellow EHP-ers will say. But I need to be motivated. I can’t just draw or paint on autopilot, there has to be a reason for it other than to please my professors.
A few weeks ago I decided to download all the episodes of Doug, one of my favorite TV shows when I was younger. It’s so cool watching it again because now I can identify exactly what made the show so brilliant. The music, the weird, theatrical older sister character, the neighbor called Mr. DINK. I used to relate to Doug so much and still do I guess. And what I realize now and didn’t exactly pick up on as a kid is that Doug makes such a big deal out of every little thing that happens to him, situations that I now realize are so unimportant, but as a kid those fears seemed so legitimate. I either felt that way then or thought I probably would once I got to middle school.
Jaded as I’ve become the older I get, in a lot of ways I’m still that kid who thinks everything I do is a big deal. There are still situations in my life that feel epic to me, to the point where I feel I have everything to lose. What I do with my skills always has to be a step toward changing the world, otherwise it’s just not worth it. That’s what these paintings will be about.
In other news, I have a job this summer! I’ll be working with Big Think on an incremental redesign of the site. Big Think is an information-sharing network that strikes an interesting balance between blogging and print journalism. In addition to user-generated articles in the form of “ideas,” they have an excellent library of video interviews with experts in various fields. I think it could really change the way people access and share information on the web for the better. I can’t wait to start.
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