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Friday, September 5, 2008

Art = Books?

When I was younger, I had a friend tell me a magic number of pages I should read before deciding whether or not I wanted to continue reading the book -- too few pages and you didn't give it a fair chance, too many and if you didn't like it, you probably would continue not to...The number seventy-five seems to stick in my head, but that seems awfully high...

Anyway, I digress. I was thinking about this with art. How do you know when enough is enough and no matter what you do, it is not going to look any better? Take the baby print for example. I don't like where it is going. Do I abandon it? Do I take a break from it? Do I do seventy-five different things to it?

Cropping it helped, but I am still not sure I like it. I was going to incorporate flies as well, but I don't know. I had to make the fly drawing into a rubber stamp though, because the detail was too much to come out on the screenprint. We'll see what happens...

2 comments:

arianna said...

75 pages IS a lot. usually by that point, i figure i should finish since i already got so far...

is the baby print supposed to look reptilian? because the spinal column on the left made me see that, before i read that it was supposed to be a baby in utero. hmm. is that why you're planning to add flies?

i say sometimes you should just put something aside for a while, and come back to it in a few months or a year. then you'll be able to see with a fresh perspective, and decide if it's worth continuing work on or scrapping altogether. otherwise, you're too close to it & too attached to the work you've done on it to just throw it away or restart it.

that's just my 2 cents. xo

100percentjulie said...

that is a tough question. how much is enough? i feel that there r some things i'd be willing to risk and keep going but i do believe "overthinking" is a bad thing when it comes to art as well. i'd say let it go for a while as well. try something new, something different. sleep on it. do other things that u already KNOW so that u breathe too. even if it's baking, or crosswords.