Reflections of the Adrift Artist

“Why is your work what it is? Like, what does your art say about you? What does it do for you?” 

These are among a few of the questions I asked myself over the last few months of 2024.

I think, when you take a look at the prevalence of soft color, ambient lighting, etc. it comes narrows down to what I want to feel when looking at my work. It’s so strange, it’s like a blend of wants, feelings, trauma, comfort, sometimes like two or three of them at the same time, or something else entirely.

It’s that underlying feeling of want. The knowledge of looking at a glimpse into what such a realm could be in an enclosed frame that preserves what is visually perceived in a concentrated area. The spaces I want to make need to possess an air of stillness, quietness, and serenity. I have a theory that every artist experiences that feeling of desire within their work at some point in their career, like a moment to be alone and find the root that sustains their work through their artistic outlets.

I had spent the majority of my school’s winter break, really just taking a break from everything, and hoping to gather ideas for future projects, etc. For a large part of early December to mid-January, it felt like I was given a strangely-unique opportunity to look at myself as an artist in-isolation. And so I did. But in that time, I managed to somehow experience illness from the perception of existing in complete and utter silence.

I was presented with the chance to try to “solve” myself not just through art, but in general. I felt like I was given time to think about life, why things are what they are, intuition; I was to think, quite literally, amongst myself. I thought about space. Outer-space. Distance in-between. The time it takes to exist from one spot into another. I thought about the idea of what space does, and how a corporeal place is non-corporeally communicating to those occupying it. 

At times where the colder weather could keep my apartment cool without the A/C running, I arbitrarily “lent” myself to my living space’s stillness and silence. But coupled the stationary changelessness of a dead-silent, empty space, I felt my sense of hearing change, and I found myself focusing on these weird pulsating and rotating noises. Like something that I could feel against myself just as much as I could audibly decipher.

And of course it obviously wasn’t real. In hindsight, though, it made me think about how often this “sound” was occurring with no other present noises, it was as if I was feeling the atmosphere and behavior of a still apartment act on myself in ways I couldn’t see, but instead internally feel.

But this recognition of atmospheric-perception was something I began to pay more attention to as days went went on. I began to think and visit other places to see how I could mentally disassemble and analyze the space of a setting. The tranquility of seeing the evening change colors on an empty highway. A clear night-sky illuminated by a Moon that life depends. And the weather, too.

I realized that something like a thunderstorm is capable of composing itself and contextualizing the day. Things will feel slower moving. The blue-grey overhanging clouds will darken and fracture across the sky. People won’t drive as fast as they probably want to. But it works to its biggest strength through the very sound it makes, as it gives people something they can audibly cling to. Sure, you could imagine it to be feeling different attitudes depending on if you were outside getting soaked or not, but that’s exactly what I realized with what a space functions as.

It showed me that every single component of a space, be it the light, the ground, ambience, sound, or scale, has the potential to personify the setting as a whole, and manifest certain emotions upon those in its presence. And this sort-of equation is what I think answers what I want the space, the subject, the visual artifacts, the haze reflecting light in a way rarely repeatable in real-world settings, and everything in my work to really say for me. I want it to demonstrate my ability to construct and visualize the fundamental principles composing life into a realm that illustrates the idiosyncrasies of lived-realities and how they exist to me.

I don’t think I ever gave my own name much attention, but I knew that I wanted it to have my own sort-of agency. It’s something I gifted to myself as a means of assertion to of what being an artist means, and I feel like everyone is deserving of some level of selfness in regards to what they do. They are their work, and their work is them.

This very identity, the self that I felt like I spent years looking for, carries the essence of myself as someone living, experiencing, and reflecting everything of it into a tangible and perceivable substrate. It carries the want to make a visual impression, the emotion without language, the voice in a younger me that yearned for the opportunity to be emotionally felt and understood.

The hiatus I took was something that I felt manifested a desperate need to answer questions I asked myself for so long in this creative area. he lows of being an artist, or really any occupation, are something that I think everyone inevitably must endure for what they love. But overall, I found it to be a very human experience

I just wanna say I did not plan to write this much, and it’s also like 3 in the morning as I reach the end of this.

So, seriously, thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading this as my first blog post. It was only last year that I rediscovered how much I love talking and learning about the work of others in their respective genres of study, and I thought it’d be cool to try and to talk about art in a way that, I feel, is more personal and down-to-earth.

I might plan to make this a semi-frequent thing, just something that keeps me attentive to media-related things. I’ll aim to concentrate everything within my work mostly, but I think I want this to be just a place where others can get to know me better, whether in or outside art. I have a few other things that I have in-mind to write sometime later between regular posting.

Signing off for now, I’ll be back here soon.

-       raiin

✧✧