Studio Art Research: On Curbing ArtBlock

Hey Stranger!

Summer wizzed by, and I have many blog drafts I never posted that I am slowly uploading. First day of fall semester is tomorrow. I’m gonna keep it real stranger, I have no idea what I want my thesis to be about. I have obsessed over many different concepts all this summer but I didn’t even discuss them here or feel as if I explored them adequately in a meaningful way. Maybe that’s my inner perfectionist speaking however. I hardly read, I did however, literally leave the country.

So here is a list of the things I obsessed over and have considered doing my thesis on with no contexts, all of them even if they don’t remotely make sense to you, reader:

1. Memento Vivierie, “remember, you must live”

2. Liminal space/liminal bodies an interactive painting installation

3. distorted childhood/memory fragments

4. On remembering times my deafness was erased

5. queer nonsexual intimacy/joy

6. reflecting on getting sober

7. Artemisia Gentileschi in a contemporary, queer context

8. how can painting become a form of mutual aid?

9. Borderline Personality disorder and childhood trauma

10. Showing disabled bodies reimagined in old traditional scenes of paintings

11. engaging with Palestine and making a series of work based on different family experiences and what their lives were like before the past year. Donating all proceeds to the families interviewed.

12. psychology of near death experiences

13. can art aide deaf children in understanding language?

14. visualizing a conversation with childhood me

15. Decay, like literally study cadavers or something

16. dreaming of my childhood home for 12 years

17. dissociation

18. a visual study of Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

19. Religious trauma

20. exploration of complex family ties and histories

21. the story of my OD and near death experience

    I feel like every time I try to think, my brain is like Everything, Everywhere, All at Once in the sense that nothing makes sense, all I know is this is all somehow connected to eachother and I have to narrow down how, because that’s where the core of whatever it is I’m thinking is, and to the average person I sound like I should be in a straitjacket.

    so my next step is to read over my thesis manual, email my thesis committee, and hit the library to read alumni theses.

    There are artists I have narrowed down to kind of imagery I am looking to do:

    Dorothea Tanning

    Salman Toor

    Francis Bacon

    Rene Magritte (the blog cover is of a painting I just did that’s a study of one of his paintings but with my own twist)

    Denis Sarazhin

    Colleen Barry

    Amy dury

    Nicole Sleeth

    Lucian Freud

    Other than that, I got nothing. But I’m aware that I am getting closer to….something? I think!!! (I don’t actually know, I have this terrible issue of questioning myself)

    I hope I figure it out

    the same anecdote I wrote in a painting exploring thesis concepts last semester, when I was first writing my thesis proposal and having so many faculty members come in and talk to me about my work. I have built confidence with that, but not cohesion in the question of: what the fuck do I want to say?

    Until next time, Stranger!