"Existence precedes essence."
- Jean-Paul Sartre, "Existentialism Is a Humanism"
"...the secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors, as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you lovers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be satisfied to live like shy deer, hidden in the woods!"
- Friederich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
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I'll admit that using these quotes as a springboard for my art blog is probably a little on the pretentious side. But I am what I am I guess. "Existence precedes essence" feels particularly apt though to me because it describes my relationship to my artistic talent: it's there, but I don't know what it means or what I am supposed to do with it. This blog is basically a chronicle of my exploration of that question.
As far as that Nietzsche quote, I have this perfectionist complex where every second I invest in art is simultaneously incredibly rewarding and also absolutely terrifying. I don't know what I'm doing, I don't know if it will ever be good enough to be interesting to anyone other than my friends and family, and I don't know if there will be any "return on my investment," to put it in completely sterile terms. So sure, I'm probably being a little dramatic, but it absolutely feels like I'm "building my cities on the slopes of Vesuvius," and I figured hey--I'm a "millennial"; why not blog about it?
The target audience for this blog is my friends and family. For a long time I didn't share any of my artwork with most of the people I knew because I was self-conscious about it. I consider this a "process blog," which means that it chronicles my development as an artist, focusing just as much (if not more) on my mistakes as my successes. As I get to a point where I feel like I'm making finished products worth sharing to the rest of the Internet, I'm transitioning to other platforms, such as Tumblr and DeviantArt.