Art is what keeps me alive.
Creating something different every time and making it my own style is what keeps me going. Knowing that I’ll be able to manifest anything I could think of whenever I want to, is the most freedom I could possibly feel in this lifetime. Freedom is a major part of who I am and creating art is also a part of me. Without art I would not be the person I am today, who has a different outlook on life that comes from the endless perspectives that are derived from art.
There are certain levels to freedom within art. I feel most free with drawing because I can create anything I want from it. Painting is a little more restricted because it has a more permanent feeling to it than drawing. You can erase a drawing, but in order to fix a painting you most likely have to start over. Being a perfectionist, drawing isn’t always the easiest when I want something to look a certain way; with drawing can come frustration but also learning the value of patience.
Art has shaped me into who I am and how I see others. Everyone has a side to them that they don’t show out in the open and instead they show it through their own art. It has also taught me that it’s okay to have different opinions from others because art is made to have different perceptions of it so that it has multiple meanings because everyone thinks differently. I have had my own work viewed differently than what I intended it to be, and I was okay with that; because I understand that people will see things in their own way.
My own collage that I made about a song called “If Today Was Your Last Day” was put in the school art gallery and someone thought that it was a sorrowful piece of art because of the mood of the piece and the darker colors to it, which relates to sadness. The song is about making better decisions and trying to fix things so that you wouldn’t live your last day with regret, so I pictured it as inspiring and uplifting, but the outcome of the artwork seemed to send another message. I was okay with that because no opinion is wrong with art, even if it wasn’t the intended meaning of the work, it still gives someone else a meaning.
UNTITLED
Hailee McClafferty, 2019