(no subject)
for the last week i've been cocooned in art school, working endlessly with sore shoulders and sore feet and limbs plastered by paint. it was over on saturday when we held the exhibition and all the works were displayed. we spent the whole day setting up with the majority of paintings housed in the white-washed studios of third year students. i was excited at first but the day rolled by with stifling heat and running up and down stairs carrying heavy paintings, drilling nails into walls and standing in a small bathroom cubicle washing layers of charcoal off my legs before the exhibition opened. i changed into a a chocolate miniskirt with buttons, tied a striped scarf in my hair and collapsed in a deserted building behind the sculpture rooms, my exhaustion mimicking the tracework of the wrought iron staircases as the rain splashed against concrete outside, finally washing away the sun.
afterwards my parents came and i talked deprecatingly as i led them to the studio my works were hung in. why do i always need some seal of approval? but they liked it - that and the comments i overheard and the people taking photos of my work soothed away the dead, prickly feeling of tired frustration. i've been confronted all week with demands that i strip away at layers of myself and reveal something raw, that i relinquish the perfectly mastered control, that i chip and dig with bloody fingers to find something inside, that i experiment, experiment, push and push at boundaries until i am reckless and exalted surrounded by crumbling walls. but these feelings of inadequacy are resolved and i will never be pushed to work at such a frantic intensity again (not until the inevitable hsc) and i leave n.a.s behind, handing in the reflection statement of sorts i was selected to write.
we had dinner out at a lovely resturant, saw a movie and yesterday i dragged my parents to see the art express with me, which was lovely and i am awed, if not by the works themselves, then by the unique execution of ideas. it's reckless to say that i am as happy as i will ever be, or that i am as happy as i ever have been, but it feels true enough at the moment. michelle's kk present is bought and wrapped (the last one), i have the cd i sought for months and i threw out my old school diary, having gleaned from it that i went through a rather comical period of depressed spirits last may through to july. i can laugh at it now, sitting at the window with the glistening of spider's silk in my eye, hands folded over a new leatherbound diary purchased at the gallery yesterday for the coming school year, frangrant with the fecundity of a black canvas.