It’s interesting how arrangements of pictures or sounds can spark certain memories or feelings. The fact that certain sounds can remind you of a time period amazes me. The same thing happens with images, where a collage of pictures can bring you back to a certain event in your life or remind you of a story or moment in time. It’s all interesting to see how certain images can create a sense of fear or horror, despite it being images of for example, a little girl with giant teeth and eyes. This sense of recognition (you recognize the girl as human) but the normality being thrown off by the teeth and eyes makes the picture seem creepy. Images are a beautiful and interesting thing.

After tracking my time for a week, I realized that my life is almost completely taken over by class and my job. I tend to (or I try to) work 5-6 days every week so it’s definitely a huge part of my schedule. It doesn’t leave much time for studying/schoolwork which is a problem. Maybe I’m a workaholic.

During late junior high through early high school I made comics that I would post online. I stopped making them for a while but for my senior year I remade the comic for my VASE project, making a perfect score (though apparently a perfect score isn’t enough to qualify for state). Though the images I have are difficult to read, I’m pride of how it turned out.

I’ve always wondered where creativity comes from. How can one person be more creative than another? The Amy Tan video suggests it could be due to mental illness or being crazy. I highly disagree with this. That seems just a little ridiculous. Perhaps experiences an artist has had because of their mental illness could spark an idea that someone else without mental illness wouldn’t have thought of, but that has more to do with personal experience than the actual illness.

Our world and the people in it are constantly changing and expanding. The fact that our world is starting to lead more onto an artistic perspective is really encouraging. More creativity can be expressed without feeling like the occupational outcast. Mostly everything being created spans back to art, whether it’s through design or structure. Art is changing and expanding just as much as people are.

PART 1:

1. The articles are about how similar artists are to business workers, and describes being an artist as also being an entrepreneur.
2.  Artists can learn from their “entrepreneurial cousins” by understanding teamwork and letting others help you reach a goal. This idea comes easy from a business perspective but so easily for an artist.
3. I agree that artists are entrepreneurs. With a constantly demanding market that artists have to deal with in order to sell their art and sustain a living through art is exactly what a business entrepreneur would go through.
4. While I do agree with most of the 12 characteristics of artists, if not all, I think 8 has a great point to it, “Artists thrive under constraints.” Creating products of great value with minimum resources is a common thing among artists, and can correlate well to business workers, as well.
5. Artists are risk takers. To devote your life to art is a huge risk due to success coming from what you can create, in some cases being in very short time. Artists risk a chance of being left penniless in order to create art.

PART 2:

1. I got a score of about 3.63 so I would say I have grit but it’s still something I can definitely work on. I feel like I have grit on certain tasks, like at my job, but on other things like school work, I lack grit.
2. Finding time to focus more on certain tasks may increase my grit. Maybe if I become more organized with my schedule and free time, I can get more grit and become more passionate towards my future goals.

Every artist has a tool and a view of the world that they would like to illustrate. This is exactly what photographers do with every photo they take. Photographs can have meaning and purpose just like any form of art. There’s creativity in the way that photographers capture lighting, color, movement, etc. Even the smallest of objects can have meaning for a photographer. It’s the photographers’ creativity that brings this purpose out.