Blog Project Example

Hey guys,

Below is my own contribution to the blog project. Please read it and comment on it, like you will with those of your peers.

Remember when you're writing your own that the goals are to:

a) Consider why you like the things you like and offer some sort of critical analysis of a creative work that you enjoy.
b) Think about how the things you like influence you and how they contribute to (or might in the future contribute to) your own personal work.
c) Learn from what influences other students. Consider this a collection for you to draw from yourself. The things that your peers like and draw inspiration from may also influence you.

Keep in mind that I do not expect your entry to contain so much about your own work. I understand that you are still figuring yourselves out. I hope this project will help you begin to vocalize and define your own identity as a critical thinker, but I do not expect your influences to be so concrete and direct.

Alright, enough blabbing.
Example Blog Entry:

In my personal work as a painter, I am influenced by a wide variety of creative output. My work is primarily concerned with pop culture, especially film and television, the internet, comics, and design. I have always been an avid music fan (I have a radio show on KRUI, Wednesdays 12-1, if you’re interested in getting more me in your life), and I have recently given myself the task of putting what I most love about my favorite music into my own paintings. I have drawn particularly from one of my favorite albums of all time: "Black Sheep Boy", by Okkervil River.

The album is a bit of a concept album, with most songs written from the fictitious standpoint of a half sheep, half boy. It is overwrought, self-indulgent, and at times awkwardly and intensely personal. But the creation of a distanced persona somehow

"Black Sheep Boy" has directly contributed to two themes in my painting:
1. The distance between the creator (me) and the persona created by the art. For the past eight months or so, I have been working strictly with self-portraiture, and in that time I have been dealing with the idea that although the person I paint is myself, it is more accurately described as me performing my own identity, in the way that the lead singer of Okkervil River performs the identity of the Black Sheep Boy. I have been thinking of myself as a character that I am acting out, and this distinction has allowed me the distance necessary to be able to perform more emotion than I normally would.
2. Painting as a means of directly communicating intense, yet specific, human emotions. "Black Sheep Boy" is most striking, for me, in its emotional intensity. The lack of emotional filter between the Black Sheep Boy and the audience can at times make the album awkward and painful to listen to. This sort of direct connection between the viewer and the viewed is one that I am striving to achieve in my own paintings. Painting is in many ways an inefficient and inaccurate form of communication, so this second goal has proven difficult.

(In the next day or so I will post some images)