Beaten Up and Creatively Spent

The creativity is gone. Here I am trying to come up with three ideas for my next assignment in Time Base Media, and I have nothing but something that will be immediately shot down because it isn't art. Why? Because I would just be copying something I saw in Full Metal Alchemist. I would be drawing a circle with symbols and my own version of the alphabet on the outer rim of the design. And apparently, that isn't art. Ideas like this sometimes make me wonder if Andy Warhol ever went through his kind of critique with himself.

Ironically, this critique never came from myself. It came from other people I posed a similar idea to. Everyone from people I respect to total strangers that think they know something about art call my idea trash. Having to try and defend it is challenging in itself, because no matter what I say to justify it, nobody will buy into it. They will just see it as nothing more but me being stupid and copying someone else's idea.

And because of this, my education has once again taken a back seat on the priority car. I found myself playing games again and wasting time sleeping trying to figure out my own personal path in life, knowing full well that what I want to do is just so far over my head it might as well be in orbit. And with such a broad scope of what I consider to be art without any kind of justification as to why I categorize them as such just makes it even more difficult to win my peers over and give myself some kind of validity.

Sometimes I wonder if I was better off untrained. The people I was around before seemed to appreciate what I was doing. Now the people I'm around tell me how bad something is and then close it all nicely by saying "Thank you for sharing" as if it was the best thing in the world. If this is the world of the artist, then I guess I should learn how to grow some balls and just take it.

But I'm burned out. The more I try to think of something intelligent and artistic, the more I realize that I don't know anything at all. The only things I do know are the things that classified as trivial and useless. And the things that I do as art are seen as naive and blatant copying.

I hate to do this to Terry, because he's seen it and told me about it first hand. I'm starting to feel like the only way I can make what I want is to just do it to spite the teacher. You know, the kind of art program where by this time, the students are so beaten up over the head by technical skills that they break all the rules out of rebellion. They blatantly make blank canvases and call it art citing everyone that came before them to justify it, bullshitting to legitimate themselves. And they get away with it but don't grow as artists because they are denying their education simply because they are just burned out.

But what else can I do? I can't think of any other ideas that would be cheating both the class and myself.

I wish the process for making art was more about "make it now, look for meaning later." I've been taught that is rarely ever going to be the case the world I thought I wanted to go into. Now I wish that I could go back to the days when people saw my cartoons and actually liked them.