I was absolutely lost in yesterday's critique and felt alienated in class. I wondered why I felt this way and came up with several reasons though some might take my reasons as excuses.
First I felt anachronistic. The only time I saw a real barn closeby was decades ago in Iowa. I did ride the combine and again felt vastness of the corn field. So I have this sentimental memory of a barn made of wood surrounded by hay, flat and huge field, cows, cow smell, and vegetable and flower gardens around a big farm house and a barn. I have seen plenty of barns while driving, but none of them looked as modern as I saw yesterday in the picture; they looked often forlorn standing alone in the big field. This is my stereotypical impression of barns.
Second I felt old (ha, it is true) and out of place. When I saw the etching on the TV screens, I didn't know who they were. The second man reminded me of an old man because of the gray hair, gray eye brows, and wrinkles on the head. While everybody enjoyed talking about him, I was wondering who he was; when his picture was placed right next to him, I recognized him. The only time I'd watch his show is when my son is home. My son introduces me to the world of "young people." I don't mean I don't watch TV. I do watch TV news, but not the talk shows. I do watch CNN to catch up with the world news, but it is often much faster to get the world news when I read Japanese news on the Internet. The Japanese news are very concise and tells the essence of the news 5 W 1 H, whereas CNN news often confuses me with a lot of debates and comments. I turn off TV when the commentators start talking over loud interrupting each other. Anyway, what I want to say here is I am not familiar with the characters etched on TV.
Third I am not up to date with all the things happened in the States. I need more explanations of the portrayal of the execution of a wrong person through the drawing. So much information in the work, I got lost and didn't know how to respond.
Fourth I am not grasping what I am supposed to. I enjoyed looking at the headless driver with a helmet on; I was contemplating why he was headless till I was told he has a head but because of the angle of the camera, he became headless.
Fifth cultural background is hard to convey in any kind of art form. The Critical Handbook deals with more of negative sides of comments based on ethnic differences, but I have more trouble with American reality such as barns, TV characters, medieval vs. modern times (this is not American, but the main character comes back to the present USA). It is my hope that I can display all of my feelings as a foreigner in the watercolor, but my second thought is they are just my feelings, and again just like I felt lost in my classmates' presentations, they might be lost what I am trying to convey in watercolor.
In the previous four semesters, we worked on different topics with the same medium. This semester everybody has different project with different medium. I still would like to challenge watercolor to pursue my project in spite of my handicap in watercolor techniques and anachronistic mentality.
I take my hat off to all these young artists for their originality to pursue their projects in this class. I wish I had this originality!
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