By Carolina Coreas
If I had to pick a memorable experience out of my Junior/Senior Seminar, I had to pick the second quarter of my Senior year. I always felt like my project would be a bit more compelling than other projects because I had outstanding visual proof that I had made progress over the two years we had in the class. The quarter previously mentioned was quite the memorable one because it represents how a giant failure gave way to another fantastic piece and how the experience taught me to look at any work from a new perspective.
It all started with a blank canvas. My vision was to print out several snippets from news articles and veterinary or animal behavior journals. After I printed them out, I would cut them out, paste them onto the canvas, and paint an image over them.
“It all started with a blank canvas.”
At first I worked on it at a good pace but suddenly I found myself feeling burdened by it that I lost most of the motivation to complete it. I despised the piece and started to leave it off for “later.”
“Later” eventually became a month after I began the project and I subconsciously tried to ignore it. But there it sat in the corner of my room at home, an agonizing reminder of how I was completely uninspired to continue.
At the same time, I had five small canvases that I needed to find a purpose for. Working with the small canvases felt different than working on the bigger pieces. I felt like I could manage my time a lot better with the small canvases, but this time I felt too overwhelmed to think about five different ideas to paint on each small canvas. So I decided to just do whatever I wanted with them without worrying about how much time I had left and I finished it within three weeks.
After that interlude, I decided to force myself to get the final piece done no matter what excuse I had. I was already halfway done with it and I just needed to get paint on the canvas. Finally, after about four months later I finished the piece in one night.
I looked at it, upset at how it ended up. I felt like I could have done better and for my standards; this piece was way below them. I actually thought about just leaving this piece out of the collection and not mentioning it in my presentation, but I forced myself to accept my work because it taught me an important lesson about myself.
Compared to this piece, the other piece I did with the five small canvases was amazing and even exceeded my expectations. It showed me how when I work on something with the mentality that it is a burden, I tend to not invest any love to it. Conversely, whenever I work on something with enough willingness to do it, I do whatever I can to always end up with something outstanding because I put so much love into it. This was very important for me to learn because it gave me a new way of looking at school work and projects that I could be assigned in the future.
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