Other people's stories

I made a goodreads account last week, and golly gosh; combining my obsession for compiling lists and my love for numerically quantifying any kind of progress, goodreads has me hooked. Given it being almost May, as well as my book-per-year rate of one to two for the past three years, I set myself a (personally) challenging but very achieveable goal of reading 30 books this year. Come to think of it, by now that's probably like... one book per week.

My first book of 2014 (finished a third of the way through the year) was Light Years by Tammar Stein. It was one of my favourite books as a pre-teen reader. The first time I picked it up was at my major local library. I may be fooling myself thinking it was on the Premier's Reading Challenge, but more likely, I picked up the newly wrapped hardcover, flicked through it, and judged that it was going to be somewhat relatable and easy to read.

Light Years is the first full-length novel by Stein. The narrative follows Maya, a young woman, from her post- high school, post- military service life in Israel, to her settling into college in the United States. Throughout her year at college, she picks apart the feelings she holds towards her past; the grief she feels towards her boyfriend, and the guilt she feels about having provoked the suicide bomber whose attack killed him.

My second book, finished at 3:26am this morning, was The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. I was assigned this book in high school. My class had to read it in Year 12 as a part of Module A, area of study: belonging. Predictably enough, it's always after you've completed that class when you feel the itch to read the book again. I bought this book early last year, tried to get into it a few times since then, and finally, three days ago, I picked it up, opened it, and allowed myself to be sucked in.

The Namesake starts off with a young Indian couple, Ashoke, an engineering student at MIT, and Ashima pregnant with the couple's first child. Like Maya, they are recent immigrants to the United States. They name their son Gogol, after the Russian writer, whose significance to Ashoke is deeper than an admiration. As Gogol enters school, the novel follows the unspoken conflicts that arise between the boy and his parents as Ashoke and Ashima conflict with the Americanisation of their son, and Gogol comes conflicts with the Indian/immigrant ways of parents. As Gogol moves onto college, graduate school, a job as a practicing architect, and relationships, the novel takes a slightly different tone as well; Gogol is apart from his parents, exposed to worlds that are untouched by the life-in-limbo that is having immigrant parents.

Four years on from Year 12, I am almost 22 now, and I recognise some of Ashoke and Ashima's habits and traits in my own parents. I identify with Gogol on an even greater level; consciously departing from the standards and expectations in education, relationships, behaviour, as set by our respective ethnic backgrounds. It's kind of shocking how turbulent these past four years have been and the speed at which things have changed and fallen into place. The Namesake acted a bit like a comb that guided me to separate the threads of the past four years to trace how things and how I have come to be now. Lahiri writes with such clarity and detail that the lives of these individuals are plausible and 100% relatable. This is a book that I look forward to rediscovering again and again.

In process/ This has been a spiel, hasn't it.

Recently, I've stopped timestamping all of the stuff I do in my sketchbook/journals and I've found that it has done wonders to my level of motivation. I've stopped worrying about how many pages I'm using, stopped feeling like I need to document everything, and I just let loose. I guess I'm just trying to do as much as possible, because the more I do, statistically, the more I'll like. Also, trying to change the way I use my sketchbooks. I can recognise that I've focused heavily on my sketchbooks, treating them as the centrepiece of my work. Now, I'm trying to think of my sketchbooks as just that - spaces for experimentation and trials and idea creation. I want my process to become less linear and branch out into different formats, i.e., not to be so afraid to depart from the 2-d off-white A5 page of my moleskines. I'm going to buy oil paints tomorrow and pick up some scrap plywood from the USyd Architecture building. I even, quite viciously, deconstructed a Year 11 scultpure I had hanging around, salvaged the wire I used for it, and, quite viciously, sawed apart the balsa base it was on. #reuse #recycle

It may have been something I read, or it may have been my mum who said it, but I am very much a dabbler in that I try out all these different things, but I'm not 'specialised' in anything. I want the fragmented ways that I use all these different materials to come together somehow into some sort of 'style'. Then again, a 'style' only comes with time, experience and perseverance. A while ago, I was thinking about how Picasso and Mondrian both started off with very conservative subjects and compositions, but of course, they are both known for their heavily abstracted paintings. I look forward to the day when (hopefully) I can look back at the stuff I made in my late teens/ early twenties and be able to trace the progression of my work.

Personally, I love very abstract, postmodern works, such as Sol Lewitt's wall drawings. I think what's interesting about it is not so much about the end product than it is about the formulaic process of installing it, and the very manner of it Being there (directly on a gallery wall, site-specific, inevitably temporary). I also think that Anish Kapoor is a genius. Recommended viewing: Oracle (black void in sandstone), Void (blue bowl shape mounted on wall), When I am Pregnant. These three in particular made me question my visual perception, and heightened the senses outside the traditional five as I tried to decipher this object (or absence of object) and how it could physically be so. Delightfully unsettling.

I was going to write about how I don't want to force abstraction in my work, because I think it works best when it comes more spontaneously and conceptually. But since I went on a tangent about installation and sculptural art, I think would love to explore space (not the starry kind) in my work. I wish I had the means and the conceptual ability to create large-scale sculptures, but then again, this post is really beginning to flop right now so I should concede that I failed to plan it and now have nothing end it

Square one

This was in my drafts from 19th April, 2014. It's quite relevant to how I'm feeling now, and it seems like a good way to kick things back off here...

Quite obviously, it has been pretty much f u c k ing ages since this blog was in use. My interest in blogging quite simply faded in favour for the micro-blogging-one-touch convenience of tumblr, and for about two years, I truly thought my "proper blog"-ing days were over. "Proper blogging", by which I mean thinking and writing and trying to come up with my own visual material rather than quick, angsty rants and the occasional Original Thing That I Made amongst the reblogs of pretty pictures and punny paragraphs (alliterating - I'm probably trying too hard).

Coincidence or not, I sort of stopped using my DSLR after I came back from North America in August 2012 (the photos are up on this blog, but I might privatise the posts, new blogging era and all). Definitely saddening, but since then, I have focused more on pen/paint/paper arts than photography. A lot of this work is up here. And in the lead-up to reigniting (maybe - we'll see if I keep this up) my "proper blogging", I have reached the conclusion that I've hit a wall with my creativity. Maybe I have become more interested in certain genres of music, but with that, I have also hit a wall, and I'm finding myself disinterested in discovering and listening to new music, whether within the same genre or not.

Maybe I have kind of wasted two-ish years of my life comparing myself to other people and constantly doubting my creativity and I feel like I have become some sort of cliche. Maybe that is why I'm retreating from a few of the things I was really into; because I'm trying to find out what I really like, and what I am really like, without all the external influences, the desire for validation/approval from people I know. Or maybe I am just burnt out.

I need to stop thinking about the end product and Be more in the moment. Stop being so scared. Try something new. Persevere. So I guess that's the conclusion for this post which I more or less winged. I'll end with a quote that I saw on tumblr which really hit me when I first read it:

“I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. He taught me that if you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it at full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.”

― Roald Dahl, My Uncle Oswald

You are an artist.

i. Google Skills, A Framed Picture of Toe Nail Polish Accidentally Spilled on a Carpet Next to a Picture Claiming That the Other Picture Isn’t Art, 2011.
ii. Alex Kellogg, 2012 via phone as medium.
iii. Dream Beam, "Art", 2012.

What is art? What can constitute art? If art is defined by its properties, then traditional 'properties' that used to define art, such as being in a gallery, being on a plinth, being painted, being one of a kind no longer seem to fit what art has morphed into. Personally, I think it's really exciting seeing the internet and digital media democratise the process of producing and distributing art. Think flickr, tumblr, instagram [click for an interested read]. Especially in music, you can really see the process evolving. Making and distributing music, which once involved many people, the artist, a studio, a record company, record stores, can now be done by one person in their bedroom, with a laptop, some [very easily bootlegged] production software, and a website like soundcloud or bandcamp, both free to use. I think it's a shame that many people don't appreciate electronic music made and released in this way (eg. "bring back real music"), just like many people don't appreciate digital (or digitally edited) photography, or modern and contemporary art. I don't feel like it's something that can be turned back or should be resisted. Like I said above, I think it's exciting to be able to witness and to be a part of this change.

Here is another interesting, slightly related article about online curatorship. This whole topic - digital culture / art and technology / online viewership - is something that really interests me because it's inescapable. Food for thought: the very blurred line between portfolio platforms, blogging platforms, and social networks... maybe another topic for another day.