Generally I don't believe in New Years resolutions but I do think the New Year is a good time to reflect and contemplate how to achieve our goals during the next year. Basically I see this as a time it to bookmark our lives and think about what we are achieving, or not achieving, and how we would like to get where we want to be.
This past year has been incredibly challenging for me- I've gone through a ton of difficult trials and struggled to investigate exactly who I am and who I want to be. I've had the opportunity to reconsider what I find important and what i need to expel from my life. This is the first year of my life I've begun to ask deep questions about who I fundamentally am and who i strive to be.
One answer to this question is that I see myself as a creative person. If I'm not creating things I feel like I'm wasting my time. Creativity is deeply important to me. I have to be working on something otherwise I feel a deep sense of guilt and anxiety over loosing time; i've felt this guilt for the past 3 or 4 years. I feel like if I'm not making something that I don't have anything to show for my time.
When I graduated from college my creative outlet slowly receded into the doldrums of work and I looked for excuses to not try. I got caught up and preoccupied with things that really weren't important to the exact essence of who I am, and I found ways to perpetuate this delusion. Looking back I realize I was afraid of failure; if I didn't try I wouldn't fail- "I can't make art, I don't have a studio," or "The time is not right, I feel burnt out." All of these excuses allowed me to be defeated before trying anything.
I've long wanted to be creating art regularly... and I finally have an art studio I can feel comfortable in. I also finally realize that I can't keep wasting time. Everything is coming together nicely, I have a studio, I have ideas, supplies, and time. It's strange to think about all of my inaction as being necessary to my feeling a sense of action.
So, despite not wanting to make a new years resolution, I'm going to make a new life's resolution: I'm going to start working and stop making excuses.
......s...without further adieu
initially I intended for these to be grey and black but liked the idea of satirizing, or at least imitating Shepard Fairey's Obama 'Hope' poster.
I sprayed the stencil onto an antique newspaper from Ironwood Michigan.
I apologize for the low res images, last minute I snapped a few shots on my cellphone. After I get a cache of work backlogged I'll take some high resolution professional slides and add these to their respective gallery.