Hi Geena. First off, feel free to call me at the same time in the morning tomorrow- but PLEASE call my cell- I will have it on (remember 9:30-10 your time on #306-1642). Today I engaged in no nerdy activities of any kind. I basically spent the whole day doing art, catching things in a creek, and playing with Safa and Suzu (another little "cousin" who is actually the child of a super close family friend). We caught a crayfish in Samuel P. Taylor, which we are keeping as a pet. Zuzu's personality is kind of like a mixture between Elmo and Golum... Try to even conceive of that. She is only two years old, but talks as if she is four. Safa is going into kindergarten and is SUPER exited about going to school with Karim. Anyway, cuteness was abound today. On a totally different note, I had allot of trouble with my mom today, but I suspect that it was totally my fault. For some reason, when my mother (and ONLY my mother, nobody else) criticizes my art, it always sounds really condescending, and her solution is always for me to redo the piece completely- which is immensely frustrating. Honestly, Jasper taught me in the best way I can imagine- He gave detailed instructions and maybe an example, and then gave us a bunch of assignments using those techniques. This really helped me learn the basic skills I needed to lug my art out of the primordial ooze of pure and un-complimented creativity, because I learn better when I am getting lots of things finished, as opposed to micromanaging a certain piece- which honestly just gets really under my skin for some reason; I think its because I like my learning to happen with rough things that I have not already spent hours on. Ultimately i'm glad that I re-did this particular piece (it was the still life that I spent two hours on yesterday), but the principal of the thing is still really frustrating to me. I wish with all my heart that I had taken more art classes throughout my life- then maybe I wouldn't feel like such an ugly duckling among artists who actually have it down. When I was marveling the other day at how good of an artist you are, and you said "oh, come on- you know I have taken allot of classes", I wanted to reply "yeah, but I have not- and that really puts me in a rut, doesn't it- because I don't have time to take classes right now, and I probably will not for a few more years". I know that comparisons are supposedly bad, but I have been looking around me for the past year or so, and noticing that there are people vastly better than me at everything I do, and that has never troubled me because despite that, I have always had my stellar seed of creativity, so that even when my art was utterly terrible (in middle school) people could still look at my creatures, and spaceships and such, and ask "what is that?" And I would be able to give them a thousand, true answers drawn from the spiraling cathedrals of my cerebral libraries, where every minuscule thought and detail can be extracted from the billions of neuronic pages that I weave every second, and presented, in words, or writing or in form. My greatest pride has always been in my little human mind, where I, through the grace of the beauty that is human intelligence and creativity, am permitted to store my worlds. Recently though, they have not flowed so freely. This is because I am trying to move forward artistically, and running into walls- walls created by the shear lack of my ability to execute things accurately. My art is just a huge, tangled mess of flaws and dreams, drawn from my mind- but when my pen/brush attempts to set it's tendons to the new task of depicting actuality, it turns against me, producing pieces that only appear truly beautiful to my gaze, and only because they are rooted in my eyes, and my hands, and my dreams.
Come home soon Geena
Here goes...
I love you
-Amin