It's All A Journey

Setting Sail for Philly (I hope)

Two and a half years after refusing to ever consider going to art school,  I'm hoping everything works out so that, in a few months time, that's where I'll be.

WARNING: THIS IS A RAMBLING EXPOSITORY POST. READ ONLY IF YOU'RE TRULY INTERESTED IN KNOWING ABOUT ME.

I've been drawing almost my entire life– from the time a college student showed me how to draw humans that weren't stick figures when I was in K-5 I've loved it. Even when I was young I could satisfy my imagination by drawing things out on paper. Many people never draw because they aren't satisfied with what they produce, but I've always been mostly happy with the lines I put down and it's always felt natural to me. 

Recently I decided I want to transfer to Tyler School of Art (Temple University's college of art) in Philadelphia. College has been an emotionally difficult thing for me from the beginning:

When I was in twelfth grade, I was at a portfolio review at Tyler when I decided, right there, that I did NOT want to study art. I did not want to spend my life competing for jobs with other artists and I did not want my profession to suck away my love of art. Art wears me out when I try at it, just like everything else. I was very nerve-wreaked by the whole college admission process to begin with, in addition to my senior year being a nightmare (academically speaking), and countless other things weighed on my mind as well. I just couldn't take it.

I started college as a freshman at Eastern University. I was an undeclared major, one of 24 students in their honors college freshman "cohort". For a variety of reasons, one of them being my still lingering, festering anxiety about college from before, I withdrew from Eastern within a month of arriving. Since then I've debated how much of a mistake that was. I was depressed, anxious, even anorexic. I came home and spent the semester working at Kohl's in Lebanon. That was the worst two months of my entire life.

Last spring I started at LVC. It was a great school close to home where I was given a great scholarship. I decided to attend LVC while I picked up the pieces of my academic career and decided what I wanted to do with my life. 

I love LVC, but I don't like being a commuter. I'm not the most extroverted person in the world (and I can't drive), so it's very difficult to forge any meaningful new friendships here though I have made a few. I also just don't like living at home. I come from a family with two siblings, and it's very strange for me not to have them around in a familiar place: our home (one's in college, the other just graduated). I feel stuck when I'm at home, like my wheels are spinning in place: it's hard motivating myself to do something about my life when I'm stuck in a place I associate with my childhood. And God I want to be a child forever. 

It's also hard to be motivated when I just don't care. Art may wear me out, but so does everything else. Everything else wears me out AND bores me. I've always been good at drawing, it satisfies me and other people appreciate it as well. College has been difficult, especially gen-ed classes, for this one reason: my heart just isn't in it –math, science, whatever- it just isn't me. That's why I'm an English major: it's the closest thing I have here to art that isn't actually "art". Writing papers is compelling enough for me to actually do, unlike regular homework papers in other classes, because I feel like I'm creating something. But it's not enough, and it's not what I want to do with my life.

I'm glad Bob had us make these blogs. It's fun to be able to create something personal and useful. It feels good when I click "view blog" and see how my efforts are realized. I love playing around with the type and finding good photos, creating my links to wikipedia (I love Wikipedia). These are the sorts of things I actually get excited about in my life and people appreciate them.

 Beyond that, I can be lazy and useless if something doesn't fulfill me. Though I didn't bother applying, I know I wouldn't have gotten the job I had last summer (working for the computer services department at Lebanon High School) because I heard from friends who go to school there that my bosses were upset I spent too long engraving inventory numbers on calculators and computers. You should have seen the way I engraved those four digit numbers! That was artwork; (and sorry I'm a human, get a robot next time you want some drone doing that shit). 

My sister is about to finish her second semester at Moore College of Art & Design in Philly, and seeing her go through the process has made me feel much more confident about it. The whole idea of studying art was daunting to me in the past. I've never felt comfortable being a leader anyway (not to say I can't be one, it's just out of my comfort zone), so I'm following in Sara's footsteps I guess (which isn't how I pictured it two years ago). 

Getting into Tyler shouldn't be difficult for me; I passed the portfolio review years ago, so the hardest part is out of the way. Wish me luck!

This post is getting really long, so I'm going to make another. This is all pretty much background anyway, so if anyone actually takes the time to read it– thank you. And also many thanks to all of you for your nice comments about my book jackets. I loved that project and it really felt good to see how all of you felt about them; it meant the world to me. I have a very loose style of drawing that isn't always conducive to finished pieces, but in that case it worked beautifully. Thank you very much! 

This is a book cover I designed several months ago. It was for a book I gave to my girlfriend, Michelle, which contained all of my letters to her. I publish my books using lulu.com. There are two illustrations on the design made out of construction paper. The first is on the back, and it's a scene from my short time at Eastern University: there's a pond with a stone structure jutting out into it. I used to sit there and read in the evenings. The front illustration is my profile combined with a flower blooming through a pile of rocks. This is taken from the first lines of U2's "Beautiful Day" (the heart is a bloom, shoots up through the stony ground), a song that reminds me of the first time I fell in love with Michelle (it was stuck in my head, and it was ironic because it was actually downpouring at the time). I put black boxes over some of the text on the cover for personal reasons!