MONDAY – Project Presentation

The night before when I was doing the week 6 reflection is when I actually came up with a better idea for what I wanted to do with my project.  I chose existentialism because it seemed like a fun topic to explore and paint about, although, I do think I’m being pretty generic.  Shout out to Petra for loaning me these books and helping me figure out a direction to go for the written side.  Do Androids Deam of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick) Existentialism is  a Humanism, and No Exit (Sartre)

TUESDAY – Painting

I went in and painted these (on the floor).  I didn’t have any plans for what to paint so I spent some time scrolling through my blog for ideas.

This doodle below is a piece I did for Inktober.  I stayed up really late that night and forgot to do the daily ink drawing challenge, so I crawled from my bed over to a used popcorn bag on the floor (from the same day), drew this, posted it and went to bed.  The content of the piece has to do with hypnagogia, the state between being awake and asleep.  Slightly off topic, I hated “Trickster Makes This World” by Lewis Hyde, having to focus on that lame book for two-quarters of a lame program gave me an aversion to the themes it uses (like hypnagogia) that I’m still getting over.  I was already aware of the concepts that book explored before the book got drilled into my skull for no reason, and now instead of thinking freely on those interesting concepts like I used to, my thinking now becomes involuntarily framed by that useless shit ass book.  Two god damn quarters, why???

Anyways, so I did the painted version and then a second piece with a similar theme.  I like the original more and might edit the painting to be more similar.

WEDNESDAY – Critique was good.

In my pieces, Jerry pointed out that a common theme between the pieces besides the blue figure was the inner framing and use of shapes.  That’s a theme that I could carry on through all of the pieces I think.  Jack said he liked the thin blue bed lines and thought it might be good to do more of those lines.  I wasn’t thinking about keeping those lines, but now I might find a way to use them.

I added some warmth to the paintings (reds and yellows) but I still need to get rid of the depression vibes!  One easy fix I think, is to change the expressions of the blue guys.  Something I might copy from the original doodle is the star eyes.  Star eyes exude power and mystery!  Instead of dimly glowing blurry sad eyes.  I’ll add them on Tuesday when I’m working on the next 2 pieces.

I don’t think I want to work with the alternate mediums idea anymore.  Maybe I can still fit some kind of collage in.

THURSDAY – Writing Workshops

My sketch:  Petra gave me two good sources, Jean-Paul Sartre’s realistic existentialism vs. Philip K. Dick’s imaginative existentialism.  Philip K. Dick’s ideas were really off the wall and he claimed to actually believe them (my friend told me he was schizophrenic).  The ideas he was talking about in his essay “if you find this world to be bad, you should see some of the others,” were the kind of stuff I come up with as a joke but secretly chew on throughout a day and sometimes I turn them into comics.  I know four people, a friend, a cousin, my dad’s friend, and a friend of my mom’s, who all suffered drug-induced psychotic breaks that brought out their latent mental illnesses.  That’s the main reason I avoid drugs.  It would suck monkey nuts to earnestly believe in absurd existential ideas like Philip K. Dick’s and be unable to tell what’s real and what’s not!

I think the 90’s movie “Dark City,” might be based on Philip’s existentialist ideas.  In Philip’s essays, he had a recurring idea of the world and our timeline being edited by God or divine programmers without our recollection of past worlds, Philip thought that he was aware of this by accident.  The movie, Dark City, is about a dude who lives in a city that shifts around every night and people have edited memories but for some reason his remain unchanged and so he is aware of the world’s true nature.

While it’s fun and interesting to have an open imagination about our existence, I lean much more towards Sartre’s existentialism.  His quote bellow resonates very strongly with me.

“Quietism is the attitude of people who say, “let others do what I cannot do.” The doctrine I am presenting before you is precisely the opposite of this, since it declares that there is no reality except in action. It goes further, indeed, and adds, “Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realises himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.” Hence we can well understand why some people are horrified by our teaching. For many have but one resource to sustain them in their misery, and that is to think, “Circumstances have been against me, I was worthy to be something much better than I have been. I admit I have never had a great love or a great friendship; but that is because I never met a man or a woman who were worthy of it; if I have not written any very good books, it is because I had not the leisure to do so; or, if I have had no children to whom I could devote myself it is because I did not find the man I could have lived with. So there remains within me a wide range of abilities, inclinations and potentialities, unused but perfectly viable, which endow me with a worthiness that could never be inferred from the mere history of my actions.” But in reality and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art. The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust; the genius of Racine is the series of his tragedies, outside of which there is nothing. Why should we attribute to Racine the capacity to write yet another tragedy when that is precisely what he did not write? In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait. No doubt this thought may seem comfortless to one who has not made a success of his life. On the other hand, it puts everyone in a position to understand that reality alone is reliable; that dreams, expectations and hopes serve to define a man only as deceptive dreams, abortive hopes, expectations unfulfilled; that is to say, they define him negatively, not positively. Nevertheless, when one says, “You are nothing else but what you live,” it does not imply that an artist is to be judged solely by his works of art, for a thousand other things contribute no less to his definition as a man. What we mean to say is that a man is no other than a series of undertakings, that he is the sum, the organisation, the set of relations that constitute these undertakings.”