Art Abstracted

8/3/25, 12:30, art

Art has always been something I'm passionate about. Thus, I've been through my fair share of art classes and YouTube tutorials. Personally, the latter have always been more enjoyable. In my experience, art classes have just been too critical. I understand that for your art skills to grow you need some sort of criticism and review, however, I've often become frustrated with the lack of nuance. For example, I had a still life art assignment some time back and I am rather good at making oil pastel still lifes so I wasn't worried about the grade I would get. So when I got my paper back with an 83%, I was troubled, to be concise.

As it would turn out, any sort of line art was unacceptable. If this had been outlined in the rubric, I would understand the points taken off. I had taken creative liberty to add a thin, scratchy, black outline to the three fruits I had drawn. In my opinion, it looked quite well. The unstable lines paired nicely with the bits of stippling added in. However, my art teacher thought otherwise. She was frustrated that my drawings no longer looked "correct."

Now imagine this, someone asks you to assemble a couch but leaves no instructions besides that it should be the vague defintion of what a couch is. So, you put this "couch" together. When this someone returns to see the couch, they freak the hell out. Why? You're not sure, it looks like a couch to you. This is precisely the feeling I had in that art class.

Because of this previous frustration, I have decided that I will obstain from any further art courses aimed to grade solely on opinion. This also means that all of the art I create is now on my own. Since this decision, I was faced with lots of art block due to a lack of prompt. For a while I tried to create art centered around fandom and trends. Ultimately it wore me out, though, as I felt my art was not to par compared to others. So I tried to better my art. Sadly, this only made me more uninterested in art.

continuously, however, I tried to imitate others' art and create things that other people would enjoy. I tried to properly learn anatomy and proportions, I tried to memorize the ins and outs to color theory, and I tried to act like the horrible quality of my art didn't bother me.

Eventually, I practically stopped making art as a whole. That was until about a month ago. Recently, I have become more andmore interested in pursuing my own style of abstract art. This whole experience has led me to create my most recent art piece.

While this piece doesn't have a title, it's important to me nonetheless. It represents how I jump from thought to thought and the miscommunication that happens between them often. The movement in the piece (hopefully) guides your eyes towards the top, bottom, and upper middle section. The negative space at the top is meant to show how despite the sheer amount of thoughts I have, I often have trouble articulating them successfully. The small sections within the rest of the piece that uses that same navy blue are also meant to convey the same feeling of your mind going blank. Along with the darker blue, a lighter blue acts as the backgound. Towards the bottom, white blended into the baby blue is simply for some dimension. Each line, dot, swirl, and shape represent a singular thought. The layering of these "thoughts" is similar to how I feel with my constantly shifting thoughts. Despite all the talk about thinking, my main goal for this piece was simply to not think. Although I have a thought out explanation, my original idea was very vague and I'm proud of how the complete work is composed.