on "Biting off more than I can chew"

I'm a collection of bad habits. Staying up late and then oversleeping, not eating and overeating, not buying myself necessities and buying stuff I don't need and of course procrastinating... but I guess my real habit is half-assing.

Grab a snack/ drink, this gets real wordy. 


In a word, no my work didn't get into the show. I'm a bit upset but I keep telling myself if I'm even the slightest upset, it means I'm spoiling myself. Admittedly, there's a lot of stuff I wish I did better, not just my work ethics, but how the finished product came to be. To be honest, I was afraid of what my family would think; I wasted their efforts by trying to do something I like instead of taking the ol' doctor/lawyer path like a good Asian.
I'm never truly happy with my work, which is a good thing if you're an artist. The problem is I lack motivation to change that. I never don't draw if I don't have an assignment that effects my grade, and I've been like that since high school. So the quailty of my work at my stage in life is extremely below the expectation for a college student about to graduate in a year. I lack motivation because I'm exhausted all the time, uninspired, and I'm always deathly afraid of what kind of comments I'll receive when I draw what I really, really want to draw. But most of all it's because I'm lazy, that destructive habit that makes me what I am now. Basically, I didn't work hard enough from the beginning years ago, and that made itself clear years later.

I wasn't waitlisted as I said before so I was technically rejected from the start. My thesis instructors have been teaching this class for years. They told me that they were shocked because this was the first time they saw people who were waitlisted did not get into the show in the end. Anyways, my work was beyond me as I never really practiced anything, so I struggled to reach the quailty that I was satisfied with in the time I was given. (A few months is a long time but again, when you try to build a house but have no idea how to use a nail and hammer, it's obvious what happens.) That's where I bite off more than I can chew. Not to be giving myself excuses for the lack of quality, but this was an observation I made about myself.


It's fact that there is limited space and many students. A complaint from last year's show was that there weren't enough works from Cartooning majors, who draw comics for thesis. When I went to the gallery earlier this week, there were a lot, staggering 50/50 with the work from Illustration majors. The workload for this year was doubled, meaning more work. Sixteen pages of comics makes for needing lots of room. Honestly, I didn't think the way the comics were displayed was logical, because they require reading, and how can you read something so small when it's hung so high up? A classmate thought the works should've been separate. Anyways, that's not the issue.
The point is, because of limited space, only the best goes up. I think you know what that means.

I remember I had a similar situation like this a few years back, in high school. I applied to have a gallery spot for the annual student show and I did not get in. Being the wildly immature brat I was, I threw a fit for forever, blaming how some students got in merely because they took drugs or bribery or because they were popular. Well, I didn't think that way this time. Because what people do on their own time is none of my damn business. I'm not putting blame on anyone because it essentially isn't anyone's fault but myself lol.

I thought to myself, "You know, this is exactly what this is like in the professional art world too." Better to experience that now while I'm still a student I guess. I sometimes feel like with a career like art, a lot of things are based by chance because you can work so damn hard, lose everything for what you do but never get anything out of it. This would be easier to accept if your dinner/home/whatever doesn't depend on that. I don't plan to make a living solely on art alone; I think there's absolutely NOTHING wrong with working odd jobs alongside making art. Lots of people do.

Well, I would not trade this experience for anything else. It made me realize I did grow up a tinyyy bit. Unlike before, instead of angst-ing I genuinely learned something. I will most likely face more situations like this in the future but I can't like it stop me completely like before. I want to say I CAN and WILL draw what the hell I like/want and still get away with that. Of course sometimes I have to make sacrifices and make work with a subject I can't give a shit about, since two is already too much. Art is no walk in the park, but it should not be like pulling teeth either, if you get used to what it's really like. Though I'm aware some artists really put "pieces of themselves" in their work lol

Anyhoo, I hope that clears shit up. I plan to remove this post at some point because again, too personal for a public blog.