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Didn’t Make the Cut: Thesis Draft

Slipping into the world of abyss when the reality of the our daily life is cluttered, distracting, noisy, smelly, prevent ourselves from reaching the state of unconsciousness. When I paint, I am floating between the two worlds: the unconscious and the conscious. Turing off the part of my brain that wants to think is somewhat hard; especially because if you do turn it completely off, it means you are dead. So essentially you are walking on a tightrope. Kinda. But it feels more liberating than that.

In the beginning I couldn’t step out of my skin to bare my flesh and pour it on to the canvas (or perhaps it did because the painting did look like vomit spilled on to the canvas).

Jim taught us to pour water and massage it in to the canvas before priming the surface. Sensual. The relationship between the painter and the canvas must be established before a painting is arrived. Or even before a painting is imagined. So that when the paint explores the surface of the canvas independently, it is not a stranger to a territory stretched by my own hands. Trust in what the paint will do allows for the freedom of the paint to move on its own, tampering with its natural movement can ruin the nature of the paint. In response, as the painter I must react to the outcome of spontaneous placement of diluted paint across the canvas.

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Stuff

When you look into the bright sun for a long time, close your eyes, the yellow dot is permanently tattooed in your eyelid, visible to the light even within the shadows. The colors of the hot pink hibiscus manifested on my paintings and the pthalo green that surrounded the small island spilled on to the canvas; these forms were rebirthed into abstraction. While I kept adding several layers of paint on to my canvas, I began to slowly peel off what I had tried so hard to cover—my hybrid identity.

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In Okinawa, the sun glowed bright red, the hibiscus bloomed hot pink, the sands were intensely white it hurt too much to see. The colors woke up Okinawa. 

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Kinda feeling like I am fucking up all my new paintings... Pretty stressed out about my progress.... 

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This is the latest painting I am struggling on. When I poured diluted paint with different mediums, I tend to pour it around the edge of the canvas, came back the next day to find there was a pool of solvent, paint, and medium right in the middle of the canvas. Not what I expected. This creates new problems I have to deal with and I am still not really sure what to do with it or how I should react. 

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So this is what I have been doing over spring break. I have been working on the outside portion of my double sided canvases. I did two so far. There were lots of trial and error on my first canvas, wasted so much time, learned from it, so doing the second canvas took half the time. I applied the glitter by mixing in acrylic gel medium with glitter rather than applying the gel first then coating it with glitter. I found that my method kept the glitter in place with minimal fallout and still kept the shine. You can see at the top picture I had painted blue dots, I had this whole vision in my head, largely influence by Chris Martin’s glitter paintings, then realized it was just not working. I played around with the projector and came across a design I had made for a painting I had wanted to explore but did not do so because it does not match the way I work. I still think the exterior of my room to be like wallpaper, but is essentially paintings. Currently working on projecting lotus flowers to create a unifying pattern, influenced by Okinawan bingata. 

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Current Thinkings

Lately, since the start of spring break, I have been watching several random videos on different types of identity. Particularly on female identity and empowerment. I am still so bothered at what the media still has on female empowerment. When it comes to talking about female empowerment, the videos that usually surfaces are how stripping and pornography is a way for a woman to have control over their body. Which baffles me because the consumers of these businesses are largely men. The male gaze. Exactly what the feminist movement is trying to fight against, or at least I thought. The solution is far from the obvious. It is complicated. Then I got to thinking about how in our society we want answers and definition. I hate how identities our constantly being categorized. And how someone one day wants to be known as xyz and tomorrow they want to be known as just zyx. Identities are constantly changing. I don’t like the rigidity we have placed on what someone can be. Why can’t it be murky? 

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Side note: I will take better picture of this. 

Need to work on making transitions for this painting. 

Seating in this room, maybe? So that way people have a change to see the bottom parts of my paintings? 

This critique was very helpful and productive. I think now that I finally got the corner of the room assemble, people were able to envision what the final piece may look like. 

I know what I will adjust or rethink for my final installation. It is always interesting hearing a diverse group of critiques that contradict each other, which makes me happy to hear that I have multiple options. Overall, I am sticking with my gut desire. I will make a small enclosed room. I think the idea I want to convey is an environment that is claustrophobic that enhances the feeling of confusion. When large paintings are displayed in a gallery in a traditional setting, there are gaps between canvases that allow for breath between viewing each painting. Even though it creates an environment, similar to the Rothko Chapel, I want to eliminate the breath. I want visual overload. No time for the eyes and your thoughts to rest. Because in my own reality, I was never had the opportunity to reflect on my identity until I found painting. The room I am presenting in its own way is like a Chapel. It is a place separate from the reality of the world, a place to meditate, and reflect; it can be an escape yet also a prison. Perhaps, in that case, it is not like the tranquil space of a chapel, rather more closer to the chaos of home life. My installation, embodies what we experience in a home. The dysfunctional family screaming, hormonal rollercoaster, trying to make dreams come true. There was never peace in my home, as many can relate. (I think?) With the addition of being mixed race, it was always harder to navigate my own emotion especially when my own parents never quite understood what it meant to be half but whole.

 If the final installation doesn’t plan out the way I intended, oh well. Gotta make mistakes to learn them. Looking forward to the next six weeks. 

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I am already looking forward to doing a new body of work after my thesis show. I’ve been thinking about the current political environment and the conversation people on ways to combat racism, inequalities, unfairness. But it seems that it results into all this bickering amongst each other. It’s ineffective and wastes time. I really love the works of David Salle and I love collaging. I’m a weirdo at heart and I think my current body of work is very serious. I think for the future I am looking towards doing collage paintings again, but less working with actual physical photographs, instead painting photographs. I am looking to adding more humor into my paintings and go back into my roots. Drawing. This will be interesting because I have moved away from planning and sketching out my paintings and if I chose to work on my new ideas for paintings this will require me to plan. I am fucking excited about graduating an continuing to paint. I have so many other ideas. Still haven’t forgotten about my Prihaha idea either. 

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Probably should update what I’ve been doing with my painting. 

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I used to train in violin for a number of years before I moved to Indiana in high school. The more I became advanced, the more I physically pushed my body until my hands began to curve into the shape of the violin’s neck, even when I wasn’t playing. I started to feel the cartilage between the bones of my fingers turn into brittle ice, cracking, and aching. I would come home late at night from long rehearsals and sob because of the stress my mind and body endured from the screaming conductors and the inescapable voices inside my head that craved perfection and attention. There was never a balance in music. There was this tumultuous feeling of never being good enough, fear of failure, reaching failure, and passion. Passion ravaged my body. We think of passion as a desirable quality when we discover a unique ability to love something we do beyond the norm. But think of the extremes musicians and artists have put themselves through to continue with their passion. 

Depression. Anxiety. Alcoholism. Neuroticism. Death. But these feelings are exuded in the same moment as you experience intense love, intense compassion, intense fire that engrosses your soul. Emily Bronte writes in Wuthering Heights that love and hate have the same intensity. These two emotions are in the opposite spectrum of each other, but because the intensity of these feelings are equal, it becomes hard to separate one feeling from the other. The boundaries between the two become blurred. It’s almost as if one depends on the other. Or in order to love you must also hate with the same fierce passion.

I see painting in the same way as with playing violin. And much of how I compose my own painting is how I would play the violin. Recently, as I was listening to a string quartet perform, I felt the familiar sound vibrating in the air. And I saw dark colors surround a lonely saturated pink glowing. 

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Gem Thoughtz

To deeply analyze my newest painting, I have been harvesting my own blood from my period. By using my blood as paintI am directly forging a relationship with my body and the canvas. The lustrous color of red.... just kidding. That was total bull. Not really sure what the magenta color means to me just the fact that I gravitate to that color a lot. I remember before painting, and maybe a little bit in the beginning of painting, pink was not included in my repertoire of colors I used in my artwork. I saw any shade of pink, magenta, quinacridone, as too feminine, yet using blue was not too masculine for me to use? Somehow being masculine is okay but not feminine? After taking color class last year, I had the option to choose an array of colors from my stack of hand screened color-aid. Literally any color I could have ever wanted and never imagined was right in front of me. But my eyes kept gravitating to that hot pink. When color started to mean more to me than its socially constructed stereotypes, that was when I let loose. Fuck it, I will use pink because it is pretty. There is no reason to it. It’s just a pretty color. 

Okay, now switching topics. Throughout this project, I have become interested in what part of me is Japanese and American. Japanese and American culture has always been formed together in the make up of my identity (one cannot be without the other). However, for monoracials, these two cultures are like water and oil--together in the same space but never combined as one. To me this is mind blowing. Many times I feel like my way of thinking is American but through the conversations with the people closest to me, I realize my outlook towards life is different from how other’s perceive the walk of life. Which leads to the idea of pre-determination, a largely asian belief. Okinawa is a very spiritual place where a lot of my beliefs are formed, though I didn’t know how much it has contributed in shaping my faith. Since coming to America, a largely Christian country, I have felt like I needed to take “Good Christian 101,″ a class for reluctant pagans . And please don’t tell me you are an atheist, because even if you do not believe in a supreme leader of the universe, christian teaching is embedded in YOU. It’s too late to change that shit. It’s hopeless to go back in time where you never heard of a God because that is the only way you can actually be an atheist is if you never heard of a God. You cannot erase the moral teachings you have learned during fundamental years of your life. Seriously. I know. It seems like people, in whatever community I lived in, have always questioned my beliefs. Yes, technically I was baptized, so that maybe makes me Christian? But I grew up visiting buddhist monks and participating in yearly activities. My teachers would dress up as evil ogres in red masks, who obviously looked like they were in costumes, but still succeeded in making me and my friends cry. Side note: Yes, my teachers actually made me cry every year (this would probably not be allowed in America). But it was for a good cause, to get rid of bad spirits who might linger in our soul. Okay, now coming back to what I was originally talking about --predetermination. With all the bad things happening in the world, I truly believe everything is happening for a reason that has already been planned, out of our control.

This is also how I see life. Everything good and bad happens for a reason. I do not live my life just sitting and waiting for life to pan out as planned. I react to events and later realize this was fate. How I see it is that people are born into a world in bodies that already have exterior disabilities or these disabilities are internalized or both. This is fate. But it is also a challenge to see how we use our own difficulties and make them into advancements. Coming to America, my mom has struggled assimilating into a country that saw her accent as an indicator of stupidity (she started learning how to speak english at almost 40 years old). Furthermore, her mother died around my age. It prevented her from receiving a college education as she spent many years taking care of her mother until her death. After her mother’s death she taught my grandfather how to cook and take care of himself. Okinawa was very poor after WWII. Both my grandfather and mother came from a community that hasn’t seen a floor that wasn’t made out of dirt until only a few decades ago. 

Predetermination allows us to be optimistic about the future. Even during hardship, we must endure them, which will shape the coming generation through the experience they had suffered. This is why I work hard. I feel that my ancestors, my grandfather, my mother, and everyone else lived this type of hardship in the hopes that the next generation may find an opening. That their life, my ancestors had carved out opportunities for me and my sister. Suffering has a much greater value than success. Sometimes we have to except discrimination, poverty, unfairness even though they are morally wrong. However, it is about how we use suffering for our own good. We cannot control the actions of others. Only we have control to make use of the negativity in our life and change it and use it the experience to become better than what we were. My mom is thankful for encountering discrimination, poverty, abuse. Don’t get me wrong, what was done to her was unacceptable. However, there was fate in her journey. And so, her fate carried on to my journey. Without negative experiences, we cannot become greater human beings. Or should I say, without negative experiences, we cannot become humans. Period. 

My mom would always tell me good things would follow if I prayed hard enough to my ancestors. Every year since my grandfather’s death, only good things has come. 

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So this is how the other painting turned out. 

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Sometimes boring is fun. Priming up the canvas to do more awesome stuff.

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Sometimes boring is fun. Priming up the canvas to do more awesome stuff.

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Current.

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Thinkings

There are different chapters in our life and sometimes it is hard to see when one is closing. I feel like sometimes I have lived different lives within my lifetime. Each move I still feel like me but a different version of myself. Sometimes the change in environment is drastic from Okinawa, to Wisconsin, to Tennessee, to Indiana, and to now. I made friends from all levels of social status forged by the opinions of grade school children. The people I have encountered shaped the person I am today. But I feel disconnected. I'm so used to change. My body, my mind, has adapted to change. I don't hold on to relationship with friends, especially. It is easy for me to not take anything personally. I just except it as a natural part of life. Is it natural, though? Maybe with my paintings, there is a loss of personal connection. Even though my hands are making these paintings, the images I am using is technically from my home in Okinawa, but is it really my home? I feel like a foreigner in every place I have lived in. A stranger to the community but observing it within. Where and how do I place myself in this situation? Because of my experience through my childhood, it has made it easier for me to easily slip in and out of environments. Sometimes I forget who I am because I can quickly adapt my personality to the people I befriend. I, myself, feel like multiple persons. Through this process of adjusting which side of Emily I reveal, I have developed eclectic personalities ranging from "normal" to freaky. I think my paintings have a hard time being categorized as well. It takes on multiple roles. I'm okay with the ambiguity driven by the paint splashing, collage ripping, and crazy bright colors. If anything I want more crazy colors that hurt your eyes, more crazy shit, and bigger and bigger paintings. Hey, I want to go crazy because I think I am going crazy.