Rambling About Goals and stuff.

Hello, audience. Here's my first post for 2014, though since I haven't been especially good about posting regularly ever, I wouldn't read too much into it. It honestly just occurred to me that it's New Years day, so expect no lofty resolutions from me. I don't have plans for a regular posting schedule, or anything like that. I do intend to do more writing in the near future, but I'll have to be a little (or a lot) more disciplined about everything.

Damn you, Discipline! You and The Pendulum can just go away, and I'll keep wasting a lot of time.

 This game may or may not have eaten nearly half a day since I bought it like three days ago...

Actually, discipline is closely related to the thing I was actually intending to muse on. (Publicly musing seems dangerous, and yet it's one of my best ways to think.) My older brother was in town "for Christmas" (he actually arrived on the 26th), and something he said to me while he was here was that "you are either moving toward a goal, or moving away from it." Or something quite similar to that, anyway, and I've been thinking about that idea.

I have several goals, some of them more nebulous than I'd like to admit, and I am (despite what seems to be popular opinion,) actively pursuing at least some of them.

Admittedly, the one I'm moving toward most actively is moving into an apartment, followed by finding a different job, but those either don't seem to count, or seem depressingly impotent.

But I'm not sure I agree with my dear brother. The essence of that thought is definitely something I agree with, and it seems a little nit-picky (ewwwww....nits.) to bother disagreeing at all, but I do. Goals are not always something you can actively pursue; sometimes there's a time for such things, or sometimes goals don't always have clear paths to pursue.

This sounds a little defensive, now that I say it out loud (or in print), and I don't deny that I could definitely be working harder on most of my goals, but it's something I think is still true.

There seems to be this trend, especially in my generation--I don't know about you older or younger people, but I suspect that it's also prevalent--that you are supposed to have a Direction, and a Plan. People begin asking about such things literally the second you graduate high school, and they always disapprove if you don't have an answer, because if you don't have a mission for your life, the expectation is that you will hop into the grooves worn by previous generations and go to college, get married, reproduce, and do something professional in fields you tested well in during school. Usually in that order.

God forbid you don't have a distinct list of goals, complete with dates, deadlines, and color codes. Because the people that don't have a Plan grow up to be losers. You don't want to be a loser, do you?

Not that I can say much in answer to that mentality. I'm an artist.

Some people I've known have a clear idea of what they want to accomplish with their lives, and they're doing what they think is necessary to making those things happen, like getting the pertinent degrees and certifications and suchlike, and in some ways I definitely envy that, but I don't think it's necessary. People say all the time that life is a journey, and it's about the journey, and other variations on that idea, but it seems like no one treats it that way. Experiencing life as a series of shaping events and experiences is seen as short-sighted and lazy even as people post inspirational photo-manipulations and quotes on their social networking pages saying just that.

But only if you have a defined destination. We don't want tourists or explorers.

I think this falls into the same category of "no winning" as the housewife dilemma. For those who don't know what I mean, even after years of women being allowed to work and have careers, there is still this idea that if you have a career, you hate your kids, or are selfish for having your own life and not having kids, but on the other side, if you choose not to have a career, and stay home with those same children, you're wasting your potential, and it's seen as a total cop out of having your own life.

The difficulty with these situations, I think, is that they're both not true, and people are forcing their presumptions on someone else, and demanding that other people make the same choice for the reasons they would, when that is impossible.

Not everyone has to do the same thing. It's okay to do and think and be different. We don't have to hate people for that.

Another thing that people say and don't do...I think the internet is going to call everyone on their hypocrisy someday.

I hope I'm not online that day.

Thinking About Art Again

So I was in my 3-D Design class (traditional, not digital) today, and I was thinking about art. Go figure, right? Thinking about art in my art class? What nonsense you spew, Rachel!

Anyway, we were discussing the pyramidal structure, and I had this thought.

For those of you who haven't taken any art history or design, we as human beings like things to be structured as triangles. They automatically create this mysterious sense of unity in a composition, and it's subconsciously pleasing. You see it a lot in classical art, especially the early to mid Renaissance, but it's been around for ages, and we still use it.

This is what I'm talking about. Just look at the number of triangles you can draw.

So we were talking about structure, and the way it can affect the space a piece of art fills and how you perceive it. 

And if you don't know what I mean, I don't really know how to explain that for you.

Anyway, I commented that I think a lot of structure is actually instinctual in art. It transcends cultures and training and skill level in a lot of ways, solely because it feels right.

And that, I think, is what really makes an artist. Obviously training and disposition and interest come heavily into it, but what I seem to find consistently with artists is that they operate a lot on their instinct without knowing the terms or techniques they're using. Many times, I've drawn or painted something, and then in a class or something I learn about radial nuclear compositions or some other technical term, and I end up thinking, "Hey, I do that all the time!"

So my thought for the day, which I've taken my sweet time in getting to, is that art is really about understanding what feels right, and running with it. That's where it starts. It's not a whole bunch of artists looking at their predecessors and going, "You know, he did that, and it worked out really well. Maybe I should try using diagonal lines and the relationship of objects to create movement and drama in my art." They usually just go, " You know what would look cool?" or "Something about this feels off somehow...." and then comes the execution, which someone looks at later and praises the balance of the composition, or the unity of color, or whatever thing they're looking at.

It's as much about instinct as it is about skill.