What drives our art?

Slime mold, matthew barney, wow report, beirut, michael jackson...what do they all have in common? They all provide inspiration and serve as either mentor, or muse to my classmates. These and all the other choices for the projects we've undertaken are all interesting and diverse interests. It would seem that my classmates have a great many inspirations for their work and it is fascinating to see the relationships between some of these choices of inspiration and the projects that have been developed in connection with them. Even though some relationships seem more direct and obviously connected to the end product than others appear on the surface, these choices have all had interesting impacts on individual works of art. I have to say that my own choice seems plain and ordinary by comparison.

I had difficulty picking a mentor that I saw could be easily related and explained to others. My first instinct was to report on my inspiration from a man named Juan Carlos whom I met in Siena. The difficulty is that I have no real facts or information concerning this man and sometimes I am not convinced myself that he actually exists. He was the most remarkably positive person I have ever met, a practicing artist despite all of his life's hardships, and he is a man who has discovered the secret to his own happiness. He is the type of man who can make you feel incredibly good about your life just by sharing some of his life stories to show that your life is not so bad and that if he can still be this positive you had better be. Juan Carlos is the type of man that can tell you everything that you want or need to hear, but make you actually believe it in a way you never thought possible. He is the type man that I aspire to be, an artist who works by his own methods and standards to accomplish his goals and reach people in a way that is very rare. Unfortunately, I have found no traces of this man on the internet yet even though I know that he has art around the U.S. and Europe and has impacted many lives besides my own. He still remains mysterious and seemingly unreal or invisible even though he is impacting so many with his artwork. I hope that some day I may do the same with my artwork.

I ended up picking Christopher Nolan because of his works like Memento, and the Prestige. I half wish that I would have found something a bit less obvious or mainstream to impact my video in a less blatant and perhaps more fruitful way. However, I think that the connections I made did provide some necessary structure and goal to my project. I thought about new video techniques, using filters like sepia tone, to add a reminiscent quality and increase emphasis by using contrast to tie my scenes together better.

IHRTLUHC
Jordan Severson