Self-Assessment:
The first day that I swiped my card into the building and went up to class; my head was full of thoughts. My stomach was bursting with emotions thanks to the homesickness was starting to kick in after spending a week with my family. I sat on a chair, picked up my pencil and began to write my own artistic journey here as a developing artist.
The weeks started to tumble and the time flew away. In my studio class we mainly focused on actually making and building our own ideas in to forms. The projects were all surrounded by my memories, personality and my social skills on how I cooperated in groups. I realized that I was used to working on my own and dealing with everything by myself which naturally gave me only one point of perspective. A negative part of this was I was limited to only my ideas which I realized that when I started to collaborate in some group projects. By taking place in-group projects, I practiced my communication skills and built up trust between my partners. I learnt how to share the workload equally where before I tend to load it to myself. The reading and writing exercises that we did in Seminar class kept me on track with documenting my artwork and supporting them with an explanation paragraph. This process broadened my ideas and enriched the final result.
Moving towards the middle of the semester, I was introduced to writing a research paper. Step by step we went over on how to build up a bibliography, finding reliable sources, and how to make citations in order to give credit to the actual author. After gaining some knowledge about how to come up with an interesting and a researchable topic, I realized tedious the process was. My starting point for my research was my interests and how much of an influence they make in my life. Secondly I thought about my hobbies and things that I enjoy to do in my spare time. I came to a conclusion that I wanted to learn more about one of my biggest hobbies, yoga that I have been doing for almost three years now. It wasn’t a surprise for me that I focused on the mandala design because of my interest in art and design. I looked up various sources of information to learn more about it’s evolution and what purpose it had. The more I searched, the more I went deep and found out how ancient people used it as a tool for meditation. Then I wanted to compare its purpose to how its used today and what affects it had due to commercialization.
My plans for the next semester are to keep my curiosity going and to be inspired from every opportunity that I have. I have learnt that with an open mind there are literally endless possibilities of things to discover. As for more academic skills, I feel comfortable while writing a bibliography and expressing myself in my own words. I now have an understanding of how to shape my interest in a form of a question and be able to learn more about them. Another important note to myself would be to remember to think critically and make a point after I find a reliable source to trust
To conclude my thoughts for this semester, one of the most important aspects of having an integrated Studio and Seminar helped me realize that everything that you do becomes stronger when there is a connection between the idea and the process of making it. As for the viewers, it becomes much more easier to understand the message that the artist wants to express and get a true understanding of what the concept is about. The one thing that I would like to explore next semester is to learn more about creative writing and possibly move onto write in fiction. Looking back at my work, it is easy to say that they have a strong narrative and a deep story behind them which I feel like with the power of words and the magic of descriptive language I will be able to make a difference.
