Some #art thoughts I've been struggling with:
1. I'm learning to do oil painting. I have a lot of cultural baggage about painting, from outside. Oils as high culture, mastery of art, pure fancy creation.
2. I'm deep in a math art place, variations on Menger sponges and related ideas. Stark geometric objects, fine hard lines and proportions.
The two fit together weird; I feel like my subject is fighting my medium, and yet feel like using tools (stencils etc) to mitigate that is "cheating".
And that "cheating" sense is something I'm trying to power on past, to say, fuck it, there's a whole history of modern art unmoored from fusty Old Masters mystique. My hand is unsteady? I need a sharp straight line? Do whatever makes it happen!
But it's still there in the back of my head, in the wrestling match between different things I could do when I sit down to paint. Better to use a tool, force a straight line? Better to freehand and train my unsteady arm? Better to find a compromise? Etc.
@joshmillard Why in general does one use tool X to express thing Y?
@henryseg There's a part of me that wants to say "because it works" and clap the dust off my hands and call it a day. And with a lot of creative work I do I manage to actually leave it there.
In practice it's not that simple and worrywarting aside I think I'm glad about that, because thinking about tools and how they work and how they don't is interesting and something I enjoy interrogating in/as the process of making something.