Marisa D. Aceves. Satellite 3: Uncharted Landscape: Dune 1. Digital Photography. 2014
Check out the rest of the Satellite 3 Series at http://www.acevesart.com/
Let’s face it, when it comes to creating art, sometimes we encounter a serious mental or emotional block.
When we’re desperate for answers to our general lack of enthusiasm and productivity, we search the internet for websites, blogs, art magazines etc. that are willing to address this issue.
Eventually, we discover a general pattern in the advice that we receive from some of these sources.
This particular advice is as follows: “Always show up each day to work in your studio. Don’t be afraid to play with your materials to get over the fear of creating art.”
However helpful this advice may seem, it is only useful if you consider one very important point:
All the playing and experimenting in the world won’t help you unless you create with intention.
What is “creating with intention?”
When you create with intention, you create with a specific artistic goal in mind before you begin experimenting with your materials.
This particular goal will help you to define how and in what way you play and experiment with your materials.
For example, let’s say that you want to create a series of urban landscape paintings, but you are unsure as to what colors that you want to use. You might play/experiment with color scheme in order to decide what type of mood that you wanted to convey with your work. Executing small painting studies with several different variations of either warm or cool colors might help you to achieve this goal. Painting studies might also be used to determine which composition you find most interesting or pleasing etc.
In these two examples, “playing/experimenting” would be considered effective in determining the final version of your urban landscape paintings.
In the above example, I used painting, but this same concept could be applied to a variety of different mediums, sculpture, photography, drawing and digital art.
There are some people who say that it is “freeing and fun” to just paint or create without any worry or concern about the end result, but I disagree with them. Sooner or later, you will be driven to seek meaning and purpose in your work.
When you finally do decide to create work that you want to share with the world, you will find that you can’t do so without both an adequate understanding of the basic foundations of all successful art (line, form, shape, composition, etc.) and a specific goal in mind.
Creating without intention is to create without purpose. While that may have it’s momentary joys, creating with intention, (though sometimes challenging) is far more rewarding.
If you have any questions about this post please let me know, I’d love to hear from you!
ABSTRACT RECEPTION 