Eight Hours 09|04|14 Blog #2

This past week I got the chance to go and see the creation of art. I walked in, and despite the fact it was hot, people had started working. The artist were cool and confident about their works. It felt as though they didn't even notice you being there. The artist had 8 hours to work on their pieces of art. That takes an immense amount patience. When I painted for the first time I spent hours trying to perfect it and I always hated having to take a step back and look at. I just wanted to finish it as quickly as possible. But these true artist spent 8 hours perfecting their own unique pieces. Each of their works was part of them. Some unique, unearthed part of them was simply transformed in to a physical work and made tangible. One man took parts of his trinkets that he collected and brought them, then asked on viewers to create wrapped strings of metal with trinkets attached that meant something to them. He strung them up on the wall and created a beautiful collage almost of these wrapped metal strings that represented not only the people who made them, but himself. He allowed others to take a piece of him and create from it. That can be extremely difficult and testing. I think that it takes a lot of patience to let someone in to do that. You want to guide them and show them how it should be done, but you have to realize that everyone's brains work differently. Because like the artist all of our minds are unique.

I joined one of the art pieces that was being done. The man wanted to find characteristics of people that made them feel confident in their appearance or more feminine or masculine. So I joined and mentioned parts of me that I thought I wanted to enhance more and fix. I can be extremely self conscious of my appearance and the make up artist that was part of tried to help me by accenting the parts of me that I liked and clean up the parts of me I'm not so keen on. The make up artist did winged, cat eye, eyeliner to emphasize my green cat-like eyes. Then she contoured my face and especially my nose because I am uncomfortable with the size of my nose. Then the photographer would use the lights to emphasize the parts of you that you wanted to focus on. It was terrifying and I absolutely hated having my picture taken. Many people said that it was awesome though that I participated it. I guess in the end, it helped me realize that my eyes are something different about me and that even though I'm uncomfortable with the size of my nose, that they are both part of me. I do think it takes more than a photograph to accept yourself though.

(Top right corner)

The art show was something like I've never seen. Its amazing to see how the artists work and create. You get an idea of how their minds work. Eight hours is a long time. It takes patience and being able to immerse yourself into the work to be able to work that long and that proficiently. A lot of the time artist will start something then put it down for awhile and come back to it. But like a good book, the let themselves be dragged in and be completely immersed in to their works. It was really quite inspirational and beautiful.